acline's blog

Here are excerpts from an essay I recently submitted to a proceedings journal to be published by the Missouri Broadcast Educators Association.

Negotiating the Story Online: Social Networks and Critical Pedagogy in Broadcast and Documentary Journalism

The open-source movement is an accepted phenomenon of the internet, especially regarding the production of software and the sharing of academic knowledge (e.g. the Linux operating system and the MIT open courseware project). We daily see evidence that open-source journalism is becoming a fact of life for print journalists as newspapers open their websites to citizen participation. Independent news organizations are creating sites in which citizen-journalists assign, report, write, and edit the news (e.g. Wikinews.com and myMissourian.com). Unlike the previous generation of documentary journalists and broadcasters, today's student will work in an open environment that will present significant professional challenges as citizens increasingly participate in the production and critique of news and features. Open-source projects, and the online social networks these create, could offer broadcast journalism students significant critical learning experiences now. In addition to gaining practical knowledge, such projects may allow students to discover critical approaches to documentary and broadcast journalism by witnessing, and participating in, the complex heuristic dialogue of an online social network.

Analysis
Open-source project: The Echo Chamber
Interview: New York University Journalism Professor Jay Rosen
Running themes [tags]: 1. Perceptions of the danger Iraq posed to the U.S. and the Middle East. [danger]; 2. The voice of debate: who was covered; who was ignored. [voice]; 3. Motives of political and journalistic actors as portrayed by those actors. [motive]; 4. Arguments for war as given and portrayed. [argument]; 5. Journalistic practice in regard to covering political and journalistic actors. [practice]; 6. Relationship between the public and television news. [public/TV]

Here's a quick review of the five themes I'm following in my long-form analyses of the interviews and the tags [tags] that will indicate each (subject to change):

1. Perceptions of the danger Iraq posed to the U.S. and the Middle East. [danger]
2. The voice of debate: who was covered; who was ignored. [voice]
3. Motives of political and journalistic actors as portrayed by those actors. [motive]
4. Arguments for war as given and portrayed. [argument]
5. Journalistic practice in regard to covering civic actors (including journalists). [practice]

Analysis
Open-source project: The Echo Chamber
Interview: CBS White House Correspondent Bill Plante

This is the first of my analyses of the texts of the interviews for The Echo Chamber project. As such, it will be a bit more sketchy than those to follow because each analysis will build on previous ones. My job is to look for the threads of the thought that create a web of knowledge across all the interviews. No web exists in fact. I will be creating it based on my application of disciplinary knowledge (rhetoric) to the texts. Because this is an open-source project, anyone may analyze the interviews for themselves and create their own webs. Together we will create meaning.

I identified 5 themes. The commonality among these themes is persuasion--political and journalistic. Further, each theme deals with epistemological concerns, i.e. how the political and journalistic actors know what they know, who may know it, who may speak, how they may speak, who may be heard, and how this collective knowledge may be evaluated and disseminated. Nothing in this first interview challenges the standard metaphor of journalism as lecture. The epistemology here fits the culture's noetic field and standard journalistic practice:

1. Perceptions of the danger Iraq posed to the U.S. and the Middle East.

EXAMPLE: "And what brought it back to the fore in the debate about the war in Congress was the widespread belief, promoted by the government, that we were subject to attack again."

2. The voice of debate: who was covered; who was ignored.

EXAMPLE: "Reviewing some scripts from that period, I noticed that in mid-March we still had the Democrat leader of the Senate, Senator Daschle, complaining about the rush to war without the completion of arms inspections. And he was certainly not the only voice, so Congress wasn't silent. That's first thing. Nor were media -- Congress wasn't silent, nor were critics of the idea of war who were also heard in the media. Perhaps not to the degree that government's message was heard, but they were heard nonetheless."

3. Motives of political and journalistic actors as portrayed by those actors.

EXAMPLE: "Members of Congress, particularly members of the House, are extraordinarily sensitive to public opinion because they run every two years. Therefore even many of those who had personal concerns or reservations about the war were listening to their constituents, and very concerned about how they would feel. And didn't feel that the constituent concern that they heard outweighed what they considered the inadequacy of the argument. That was the situation in Congress."

4. Arguments for war as given and portrayed.

EXAMPLE: "The argument focused on the weapons of mass destruction. The argument was also heavily influenced by the notion that Iraq might somehow have been connected to, if not to 9/11 at least to the shadowy terrorist network which promoted jihad and 9/11."

5. Journalistic practice in regard to covering political actors.