The Reporter qua Intellectual

This post has been written by Vipul Vivek during the lecture series taken by U.S based journalist Robert Jensen.

Vipul can be reached at huppuguga@gmail.com

How Robert Jensen harked back to Gramsci at Asian College of Journalism, Chennai

Nobody has internalized the post-modern paradigm of the momentary, the specific and the disjointed better than the modern professional journalist. For her, the story is over once it’s out. She moves on to the next story in her beat. She moves on as if they were all ahistorical pebbles that made no distortion whatsoever on the time-space fabric. She moves on with a seemingly innocuous belief that the grand histoires were best left to university departments, or at least, moved out of newsrooms.

For Robert Jensen, a former journalist and currently professor of journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, this is a more important reason why mainstream journalism in the US is in a crisis today, more important than the failure of an unsustainable business model that the media, especially the print media, deluded itself with for almost two decades, until the World Wide Web shook their complacency.

He was at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai to give a series of lectures critiquing foundations of journalism in the US from March 15 to 19, 2010.

A journalist’s paradigm is one of a storyteller’s. He observes the world without, makes an impression within and then narrates those observations for an audience or a readership/spectatorship. But a journalist’s paradigm is different from that of storyteller’s insofar as he has a greater commitment to truthfulness, in fact, a sacred commitment.

But truthfulness of what?

First, of course, an accuracy of facts is an indispensable attribute of a journalist’s story. Unfortunately, Mr. Jensen deplores, the idea of factual accuracy has been frozen in the US media to mean information handed out by ‘official sources’, i.e. the government and corporations. Though there are practical reasons why journalists don’t question this convention – it’s easy, cheap and protects them against libels, they are only one part of the story.

Journalism has come a long way from being perceived as a working class job in the late 19th and early 20th century to a ‘respected’ profession today. Journalists claim to serve the masses but are increasingly detached from their social realities. They conform more to the Gramscian notion of a traditional intelligentsia – which Mr. Jensen alluded to when he characterised journalism in the US as having “risen above the world”.  They have risen to become a part of the technocratic class of lawyers, bureaucrats and executives. Class allegiances having changed, a change in metaphysical outlook – and hence, values – becomes ineluctable.

 

At the same time, he loathes journalists becoming partisans; in his paradigm, she is “independent” in her critique and maintains an arm’s length distance from all political establishments – dominant or subversive. 

But, as they say, it never rains, but pours. A random sample of news reports on any issue in the US betrays the sad fact that they are generally found wanting in a structural explanation, let alone critique. And this is not because reporters lack a sense of  historicity and sociological context. The malaise results from an accepted norm of being ‘non-ideological’.

The norm is rooted in the hallowed claim of ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’ the dominant institutions of media often make as being central to the definining attributes. Mr. Jensen finds it hard to understand ‘objectivity’ as  

1.      if we accept their common sensical meanings, i.e. not cooking up stuff and keeping an open mind, then there’s nothing special in the claim. It holds for one and all. How is it definitive of the media?

2.      and, if we accept their scientific meanings of being rigorously well-defined, then they lie outside the domain of journalism.

 

The only way journalists can, and should, understand ‘objectivity’ is in the sense of independence – having independent sources of information and being able to critique the conventions of journalism independently.

And here begins the problem.

In a corporatised structure that is largely dependent on advertising, it is difficult to unseat the ideological agenda of capitalism that the rational self-interested profit-maximising firms set.

And here is the nub of the problem.

For capitalism is not only accepted by journalists – liberal or conservative – as natural but also intrinsic to the land of exceptional freedom that is America. To compound it is the faith and belief that Uncle Sam is on a Holy Mission to purge the earth of all that is evil and replace it with capitalism and liberal democracy, the way Americans understand them.

That, Mr. Jensen self-abnegatingly analyses, is what reporters need to tell in plain words, i.e. objectively. But for that she will have to dispense with her conceit that philosophical, historical and sociological ways of thinking about the greater narrative based on and in which the journalistic narrative works can be left coolly to intellectuals out there. 


Photo credits: americanswhotellthetruth.org

Dinner

"Outside the restaurant, the two girls felt the hot wind blaze against their bodies. It hadn’t been just another day." Parul Shankar recounts an incident and wonders about the realities of patriarchy as internalised by women and as exerted by men in our society. Parul can be contacted at dreamsnlife@gmail.com 

The lights dimmed further and the record took a stronger flavour of country music. Closing one’s eyes, it felt like an American cowboy hangout on a cold, grey evening. It was only when the eyes were open and the world not in a whirl that one could distinguish the setting to be much more sophisticated and urbane – a modern-day restaurant that had to its credit the exclusivity of a beautiful glass-panelled bar, a fibre floor flooded with coloured light, LCD screens telecasting a live cricket match and walls and a ceiling customized to create the ambience that the name of the restaurant promised. One smiled coming back to this privileged world, realizing that the chill only signified a comfortable air conditioning meant to keep out the stubborn heat of mid-March in this tropical part of the country, greatly distanced from the American cowboys in both time and space.

It was supposed to be a normal get-together with friends on an equally normal day. Nothing could have prepared the two young girls for the chance that this dinner could make them question and bring about a chaos in the way their education and upbringing had shaped their perception of the world.

Too excited to have finally managed a dinner, and with it the possibility of a meaningful conversation in the midst of strict deadlines in college, X and Y could barely keep their voices low despite the classic charm of the place. Their faces slightly flushed with the effect of the cocktails on the dark wooden table, they talked of how events had shaped since college began and the extent to which they might change by the end of the academic year. Educated in the social sciences, their conversation was loaded with ideological analysis of all that they saw and discussed.

They had just kept the glasses down when they noticed a middle-aged man slouching against the counter behind their table. He looked harmless enough, one of the many faces one comes across each day. It was peak meal time and the tables around were slowly getting occupied, mostly by office-goers and a few college students. Everything seemed fine until the man muttered some words directed towards them which neither X nor could Y discern in the busy hum of the restaurant. Only when they could understand his words did they notice that the restaurant hardly had a single table which was occupied by unaccompanied women.

The words “Are you available?”  did much more than spoiling the girls’ evening or making them speak up against what offended them, which they did, much to the surprise of the silent spectators sitting around in the restaurant, and unsettling them to a great extent.

The incident reaffirmed the feminist argument that despite the surface agency allowed to women there are public spaces that remain denied to them. It made clear the message that women who cross these defined boundaries deserve to be punished. It rendered illusory the idea of selfhood and the image of the independent urban women depicted in the broader socio-political discourse.

Significantly, the incident also brought to fore larger realities that do find mention in the syllabi of our elite education system but often go unrealized in real lives. The feelings the event generated in the two girls clearly reflected a fracture in the understanding of the internalisation of patriarchy by women. The justified anger to an offence was accompanied by a sense of shame, where the offence seemed personal and the shame public – despite the awareness that the personal is the political.

Outside the restaurant, the two girls felt the hot wind blaze against their bodies. It hadn’t been just another day. They wondered if the cowboy theme wasn’t so fictional after all. For the first time could they see both themselves and the larger world on the same platter of patriarchy – and the cowboy world of male chauvinism continued to be a reality.

F1 IN THE TIME OF NO FUEL ERA

This post was written by Jithin J Krishnan for Asian College of Journalism.

Jithin can be reached at jixxedout@gmail.com

2050, or thereabouts, will be a very tough time in mankind’s tenure on planet Earth. If experts are to be believed, that is the time by when the Earth’s resources will run out. By then, if we do not manage to colonise two other planets in space, then we are all apparently in for a very hard time.

Complacency perhaps, is the biggest threat facing us. We have facts, figures and experiments by very capable scientists everyday that helps us stare at truth in its face. And yet, here we are, standing on the sidelines, barely 40 years away from Earth-exhaustion, cheering on colossal wastes of exhaustible resources such as F1 and motor sports. An alien race looking down on us would surely think we’re daredevils of some sort. Daredevils know the risks involved. We do not.

F1 is arguably the most popular motor sport in the world today. Reportedly, a whopping 600 million people tuned in per race during last year’s F1 season. Italy and Britain are among the world’s biggest markets for F1 TV broadcasters. This year, figures are reported to have jumped up to 9 million for some races.

20 cars; 300 kilometers and nearly 225 liters of fuel spent per car. 4500 liters spent per race; 20 races in a season; hence 9000 liters of fuel spent. And this is just one among the host of motor sports that are consuming fuel at break-neck speeds.

This, is in no way the first time this argument has been posed. Responses to a call for an F1 ban have been meted with such responses as ‘footballers travel in cars too’ and ‘look what F1 has contributed to the world’.

Yes, footballers travel in cars as do cricketers and laymen. And yes, F1 has contributed several key technologies to the world that has bettered efficiency, speed and safety of many engine components. Engineering marvels have arose out of F1 that cannot be paralleled. Yet, have we forgotten to ask at what cost all this comes?

F1 as a sport is interesting, exciting and thrilling. But it’s harmful. There are two sides of the debate and there is only one possible middle ground. And that involves F1 shifting from exhaustible resource based fuel to renewable resource fuel.

But, yes, there is no such technology available today that will drive F1 cars as fast on renewable sources as it does on non-renewable ones. But at least an effort and a sense of urgency should be induced to start work to that end. If we wait another 40 years to get work done regarding this end, we’ll end up driving electric F1 cars on the moon.