Communication Scholar James W. Carey Dies
James W. Carey’s thinking has had a profound influence on the development of Public Journalism. This from a memo from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism dean Nicholas Lemann at Romenesko:
Professor James W. Carey of our faculty died in his sleep last night, at his family’s home in Wakefield, Rhode Island. His family was at his side and he was not in any pain.
If you have not already done so, I would advise you to read James Carey: A Critical Reader (1997).
Here is a sequence from the book that I quote for a paper of mine on reinventing journalism that will be published in June, 2006 at First Monday. I wrote:
Just about 40 years ago James Carey* (1969, p. 137) wrote that in the later part of the 19th century reporters were trained to be objective and, “In this role they principally use not intellectual skill as critics, interpreters, and contemporary historians but technical skill at writing, a capacity to translate the specialized language and purposes of government, science, art, medicine, finance into an idiom that can be understood by broader, more amorphous, less educated audiences.”
Carey (p. 139) continues that the journalists received a technical education that stressed objectivity. However, he writes, as “…reporters mediate between the audience and sources, they are pulled in two directions: serving the interests of the sources or the interests of the audience, which are rarely identical. Often, if not usually, reporters develop contempt for both parties they serve: the audience because it is so often apathetic and uninterested, the source because it is so often dishonest.”
But in the end Carey (p. 139) believed that since the reporters were closer to their sources than their audiences, they turned their sources into their “ultimate audience,” and became more “allied structurally if not sympathetically with the persons and institutions,” about which they reported.
Carey’s expanded arguments were among the seeds of the public journalism movement, (Rosen, pp. 67-71**) which in part asked reporters to work closer with their audiences and to dig deeper into communities (Public Journalism Network). It was a controversial movement, and this is not the place to revisit those arguments. However it is the place to remind newsrooms that getting closer to audiences, if that is a route that will be taken, will change the dynamics of reporting. The consequences of those new relationships, for good and bad, should be considered as a re-invented journalism takes place.
*James Carey, 1969. “The Communications Revolution and the Professional Communicator,” in James Carey: A Critical Reader, Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren (editors), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. pp. 128-143.
**Jay Rosen, 1999. What Are Journalists For? New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
Tags: James Carey,, Public Journalism, Civic Journalism, Journalism
