Media Sociology and Journalism: Studies in Truth and Democracy

By Greg Nielsen

Media Sociology and Journalism is a dialogue on contemporary society as defined through news media, politics and contemporary sociological theory. The tenacity of deeply opposing truth claims in politics and in journalism exposes the current fragility of democracy as a type of society and regime of power. Debates are reviewed on competing explanations of post truth attitudes, the rise of populism, fake news, conspiracy theories, neoliberalism, nihilism, white nationalism and the flights from and to democracy. Focus is on the tenacity of deeply opposing truth claims where each side takes the other’s claim to be an existential threat. A dialogical critique of divisions in news media, politics and contemporary sociological theory provides an alternative way forward as right populism, fake news and post truth attitudes render democracy fragile. It is argued that professional journalism also contributes to this fragility when it reports or opines on the most vulnerable subjects in society but does not address them as their imagined audience. The fragility at the heart of democracy, the fine line that once crossed separates freedom from equality or rule by the people from authoritarian demagogues, are further examined through case studies of mainstream acts of journalism on the themes of immigration, urban poverty and cultural diversity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839980626

Book preview

Media Sociology and Journalism

Media Sociology and Journalism

Studies in Truth and Democracy

Greg M. Nielsen

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2023

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2023 Greg M. Nielsen

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022915691

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-060-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-060-5 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Between the Posts

Political and Sociological Theory

Undoing Journalism

1 Fake Populism and News: Freedom versus Democracy

What Does Fake Populism Do?

Is Populism a Danger to Democracy?

Fake News: Questioning Reason, Truth and Democracy

But Aren’t Lies Politicians Tell Fake News?

Corrupt Politicians, Fake News Media and Cancel Culture

2 Political Theory: Deliberative, Agonistic and Dialogic Democracy

Rawls: Liberal Theory of Democracy

Habermas: Discourse Theory of Democracy

Agonistic Democracy: For and Against

Dissensus Never Ends

How to construct time and the other

Toward Dialogic Democracy

3 Contemporary Sociology, Journalism and Society

Critical Sociology

Pragmatic sociology of critique

Explanation vs Description

Cultural Sociology

Civil sphere theory

Media sociology and trust

Latour’s ANT

Out of this world versus terrestrial attractors

What and who do journalism

Conclusion

4 Acts of Journalism: Truth, Ghosts and Migrant Subjects

The Implied Audience

Coding Undecidables

On Immigration

Reading the Democracy Bias

Legal/Policy Contexts

The travel ban

Family separation

The pandemic

Third-Person Reported Speech: Some Limitations

Travel ban

Family separation

The pandemic

First/Second Person and the Implied Audience

The travel ban

Family separations

The pandemic

5 Writing Inequality into the Urban Commons

Framing the Loophole

Recognition and the Urban Commons

The Information Commons

Coding Exclusion

The Fall of the Body into Poverty

Justice versus Law

6 Exotopy and Cultural Boundaries: The Secular Question in Quebec

Quebec and US Contexts

Quebec Society in Canadian Context

Framing Hospitality for Reasonable Accommodation

Exotopy: enemy or adversary?

(Dis)Organized affect: the personal, the political and the sociological

Conclusion: Deliberative or Dialogic Democracy?

Conclusion: Is Another Journalism Possible?

References

Index

Acknowledgments

A combination of teaching sociology, researching journalism and consuming daily news led me to engage in contemporary politics and deep divisions that define opposing regimes of truth in democratic societies. Though I am responsible for any errors or shortcomings, several people have supported, influenced or contributed to this final version.

I am grateful to Brian Singer for his insightful criticisms of the full first draft. His many challenges in the treatment of populism and other concepts forced me to revise arguments or confront my limitations in several places. Once again, Fred Evans gave me the confidence to keep working on political philosophy and my Concordia colleagues Chris Hurl and Daniel Dagenais provided helpful suggestions on sociological theory. I was lucky to have worked with the late Mike Gasher, a former reporter, editor and emeritus professor. Mike opened my eyes to the many strengths and weaknesses of professional journalism and directly influenced many of the ideas developed here. I thank also Andrea Hunter, another sociologist and former journalist who has been a pleasure to work with and has been a creative leader for the inclusive journalism project. My many conversations with Yon Hsu and our collaborations with our mentor, the late John Jackson, also orient the book’s research.

I have drawn extensively on research from several years of collective work that has been supported by multiple grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council in Canada. I have had the good fortune to work with numerous groups of amazing students from sociology, anthropology and journalism at the Concordia Center for Broadcasting and Journalism Studies. Many thanks to all those involved in the regular coding sessions and seminar debates over political and social issues in the news. I owe a debt of gratitude to sociologists Andreea and Mircea Mandache for their key input into the research design and the many years spent organizing teams. Thanks also to Celine Kamar who provided an astute final organization of tables for the most recent United States and Quebec data.

Special thanks for the affection and support from my partner Isabelle and our son Thomas who are the best part of my everyday world and who remind me there is a lot more to life than the news.

Finally, I am grateful to the following publishers for permission to integrate a select number of paragraphs from each of the following into the books narrative: Populism, Fake News and the Flight from Democracy. Navigating Fake News, Alternative Facts, and Misinformation in a Post-Truth World. Kimiz Daltir and Rebecca Katz (Eds.). IGI Global International Publishers. pp. 238–259. 2020; Méconnaisance: Lecture des nouvelles sur la pauvreté et les communs urbains en Amérique du Nord. Anthroplolgie et société. Vol. 40, numéro 1; pp. 173–193, 2016; Critical Theory and Journalism: Expanding the Implied Audience. Journalism in Crisis: Bridging Theory and Practice for Democratic Media Strategies in Canada. Mike Gasher, et als. (Eds.) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp.53–73, 2016; Mediated Exclusions from the Urban Commons. In The Urban Commons. Martin Kornberger, Ester Barinaga and Christian Borsch (Eds.). Routledge.pp.127–153, 2015; and Acts of Journalism and the Interpretive Contradiction in Liberal Democracy: Reactions to Quebec`s Bill 94 (With Andreea Mandache). Revealing Democracy: Religion and Secularism in Liberal Democratic States. Chantal Maihlé, Greg M. Nielsen and Daniel Salée (Eds.). Peter Lang, 2013.

Introduction: Between the Posts

The media and political storm that has been raging for the past seven years spreads way beyond the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum. Navigating deep divisions over what constitutes a score between the posts of truth and democracy has become increasingly difficult. Take for example someone like Dr. Fauci who journalists look to for official information about Covid-19. Somehow he became one of the most despised figures of the hard right now, struggling to take up a position at the center of the conservative Republican movement in the United States. Shamelessly slandered publicly and violently threatened in the privacy of his home, he argues back at the extremes: There is no truth, […] There is no fact. People believe hydroxychloroquine works because an Internet charlatan claims it does. People believe the 2020 election was stolen because a former president says so. People believe that Fauci killed millions of people for the good of his stock portfolio because it’s implied by TV pundits, Internet trolls and even elected leaders (Zak and Roberts 2022). He often concludes his interviews with the stark comment that whatever will to freedom is chosen by dissenting actors, the virus remains utterly indifferent. The pandemic has produced many perplexing examples like this.

Boris Johnson, for example, was praised by his partisans for his stand in the Leave campaign that ripped away a piece of European identity from unsuspecting UK urban youth. Journalists and members of his own party got excited about the push to make him resign because of drinking parties at Downing Street during the lockdown. I understand that he is that kind of politician who gets in and out of these sorts of situations regularly, but as an outsider to British political culture, getting fired because of drinking at an illegal party seems out of proportion, compared to whatever lies were told to get the United Kingdom out of the European Union (Webber 2022). Closer to home, a tiny minority of Canadian Truckers are reported to have reproduced a loud horn-honking imitation of the failed January 6 insurrection that brings the same fringe elements into a new hard right block on this side of the border (Ling 2022). They were quickly copied in Europe and down under but with little to no staying power. At first, the freedom convoy seemed simply a protest against vaccine mandates. The protest quickly became a three-week occupation of the capital city of Ottawa, and leaders put out an early demand to dissolve the government and replace it with a ruling council that would include their members. Reports are that just under half of the financing for the occupation in the capital city of Ottawa came from the US along with over-the-top enthusiastic support from conservative US media commentators and several members of the House of Representatives (Davis, Ba Tran and Bennett 2022). In the Canadian version, no one drove the monster trucks into the Parliament or attacked border guards where they camped at other locations, but the demands and threat of sedition look a lot like what happened in Washington.

The point is, speaking truths that evolve with facts about Covid-19 lands the messenger into the hot zone of dissent. Truth cannot evolve beyond dispute. It feels like it is time to stop and ask how it has come to this, and where can things go from here. But as soon as one stops, reports of another type of rigged election fight unfolds, of laws broken in plain sight, of a new form of unacceptable political speech or of another video of an African American killed by police, shakes the ground beneath. And all these things have just happened as Russia invades Ukraine and the Putin wing of the US Republican Party along with hard-right media stay in sync with Russian propaganda. China continues its crackdown on Hong Kong (with an eye on Taiwan) and the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade. Or is it that some version of disruption has always limited scores between the posts of truth and democracy? Do we have the right theoretical tools to ask the right questions?

It is no wonder the shift from January 6, 2021, insurrection to the current almost World War III by proxy is putting into question the most basic assumptions about what is to come. Conclusions remain divided as to why some democracies survive and others die when they fail to provide a peaceful transition of power from one party to another (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). According to an analysis provided by Adam Przeworski (2019), older, richer democracies like the United States are not supposed to succumb to military overthrow, while newer and poorer ones have a greater chance. Walter (2022) reports that researchers comparing hundreds of cases of countries torn apart by civil war have developed multiple variables to establish what is called the polity score. The score measures the risk a given society might collapse into civil war. A scale of 21 ranges from +10 as a full democracy to –10 as an autocracy. For example, Norway, New Zealand, Denmark, Canada—and, until recently, the United States—all have a +10 rating (Walter 2022, 135). She argues each country has stable political parties, guaranteed fair elections, a peaceful transfer of power and no important groups are left out. North Korea and Saudi Arabia among others are –10 on the scale but are not the most likely cases to enter civil war. The most determining variable that leads to civil war, Walter observes, is whether the pace of change toward either end of the scale is gradual or rapid when shifting from autocracy toward democracy or vice versa. Countries that are in between the two extremes are called anocracies or part democracy and part dictatorship with scores in the +5 to –5 range. More than autocracies or full democracies, these are countries most likely to find themselves moving quickly between the scores. According to the polity score, the United States fell from +10 to +8 in 2016, +7 in 2019 and to a +5 in 2020 for the first time in two hundred years (Walter 2022, 136). Among the most negative US variables are the widespread refusal to accept election results, politicians encouraging white supremacy and growing paramilitary or militia groups, deepening red/blue state separations, unresolved racial divisions, antagonism between religious and secular lifestyles, a heavily armed population, events such as the failed plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan and the failed January 6th insurrection. The polity score is said to have moved back up to +8 with the new administration, the appointment of Kamala Harris as vice president, criminal trials of insurrectionists and a congressional investigating committee reviewing the event (Walter 2022, 136–140).

Journalists who work in long-established legacy news organizations and many academics are quick to explain the deep societal divisions threatening democracy and the geopolitical order as a result of the rise in right-wing populism, the wide distribution of fake news and the echo chambers of social media. In Chapter 1, I argue that it is important to revisit the concept of populism and its relation to other forms of political power to better understand the new hegemony in conservative politics. I argue the loudest voices coming from the hard right separate the cry for freedom from the responsibility toward equality. The cries for liberty are neither negative in the sense of getting rid of constraints nor are they positive in the sense of gathering resources and visions for self-determination (Taylor 1985). They are nihilistic cries for revenge, (Brown 2019), an ugly freedom (Anker 2022), a resentful scream for the freedom to take away freedom from others—to determine curriculum in schools, remove books from libraries, make it illegal to cause the non-racialized to be uncomfortable about their race, legislate a woman’s right to choose and erase teaching about non-cisgendered and non-binary life histories to young students. While the left is committed to a fully re-modernized decked out care-for-all equality green state, the political center tears itself away from both sides. In 2016, the anti-hero to some, and the fraudulent huckster to others, came down the escalators to make America great again and lead the movement to get back all that is lost to generations of corrupt politicians, fake news, cancel culture and wokist democracy. If it is true that the culture wars are a heavily financed and organized form of chaos that directly fed an appetite for the January 6th insurrection and ongoing slow-moving coup, why keep calling this a people’s movement?

Media Sociology and Journalism is a dialogue on contemporary democratic society as defined through news, politics and contemporary political and sociological theory. The first three chapters put into question the theoretical foundations of politics and social science, demonstrate their strengths and weaknesses and review their relations to journalism studies. In Chapter 1, I propose a way of reading populism and fake news in terms of the assumptions both make about their audience. I acknowledge the role social media plays in democracy but put into question the conclusion that it is uniquely responsible for moving the posts of truth and democracy out of range. To keep the focus on the epistemic divide where each side takes the other’s truth to be an existential threat, I set aside review of the rich history of media sociology (Waisbord 2014) and most of those sociologists working more directly in journalism, communication and cultural studies as well as those who established more general critiques of media. I focus instead in Chapter 2 on reviewing deliberative and agonistic political theories of liberal democracy to help situate a dialogic approach to media sociology and journalism with a special focus on how journalism covers marginal or subaltern subjects. Three separate contrasting contributions to contemporary sociological theory and media sociology are introduced in Chapter 3, which reflect similar divisions over consensus and agonistic-orientated problematics. I am interested in the variance between these positions, what we might hope to gain from each and what is needed to move beyond the limits they set.

These two platforms, the more normative political theories and the general sociologies that theorize sociocultural practices, are chosen to highlight the different levels needed for a dialogic approach to media sociology. By focusing the final chapters on the analysis of how journalism reports on some of the least well-off actors in different contexts, I demonstrate the way in which acts of journalism contribute to the fragility of democracy. Even during periods where the resistance of mainstream journalism to authoritarianism is at its height, there remain everyday subaltern subjects that need a dialogic approach that would shift journalism toward an active co-experience with the subject’s lifeworld. I leave aside the question as to whether a dialogic approach to journalism could make sense when reporting on elites at the top rather than subjects at the bottom of political and social hierarchies. As discussed in more detail in Chapters 4-6, in dialogical journalism, the sources lifeworld is a superaddressee (Bakhtin, 1986) or third participant that inevitably impacts the relation between the reporter and the broader implied audience. As I will show, the superaddressee is much more specific than the more general implied audience of the news agency and its imagined readership or viewership (Livingstone 1998). The dialogic approach would require a deeper commitment to this kind of addressee and a much wider hospitality in the address toward excluded players through what Bakhtin calls two-sided answerability (Bakhtin 1993).

I take Ranciere’s (2017) argument for radical equality as an inspiration to situate dialogic journalism as a practice, rather than as a method, as he proposes. As a guide to starting analysis, radical equality assumes every subject has the same intellectual capacity prior to the distribution of senses that are said to match intelligence with the ability to carry out tasks or social occupations. He cites the example of how a child listens and looks around for something familiar to understand something he does not know as using the same intelligence capacity the scientist uses to propose a hypothesis (2017, 139). His point is not to begin with the obvious fact of inequality and proceed to gather data and report conditions of exploitation to the subjects themselves or to broader audiences, as is generally the case with studies in politics, journalism and sociology. There is no path from inequality to equality, Ranciere claims. Starting from inequality means the analyst is the enlightened one, and the subject of inequality is not. Inequality comes from everything that gets written out of equality through the policing of senses—affect, the said, the sayable, the thinkable. Ranciere (2022) calls the police anything that divides equality through the distribution of the senses and that subjectivates the actor. He calls democracy a politics that is about disrupting the order and emancipating the subject from a pre-assigned identity.

Answerability, as used by the young Bakhtin (1990) captures the exchange between speakers as equal partners in dialogue. For journalism, answerability means creating a narrow loophole through which a very specific meaning can be responded to by the subject, the journalist and the superaddressee. The assumption of equality means the more understanding each of the three figures has of each other, the more the co-experience transforms the meaning of the dialogue. I will discuss in Chapter 5 that to reduce the divisions between speakers, addressees and subjects of social exclusion, a dialogic approach needs to experiment by shifting, where possible, from a third-person to a first-person form of address. First-person address in direct and indirect reported speech grants the journalist an active role without lessening the requirements for verification and accuracy. It would mean putting the journalist’s I into the story more often as a means of addressing the subject actively without reproducing inequality through the pretense of reporting someone else’s speech neutrally or as if there was no framing or selection for a broader implied audience that did not present itself. Journalism of co-experience does not mean simply indwelling in the world of the subaltern to provide a description of that world. Moving toward journalism of co-experience assumes the active role of the journalists’ personality and politics from which they can challenge or support the subject of the report and vice versa in both a unique way but also in a way that can be understood by the more general implied audience of the news agency.

The last three chapters document how journalism contributes to the policing of democracy when it reports or opines on truths about some of the most vulnerable subjects in society but do not address them either as the more general implied audience nor their lifeworld’s as a more specific superaddressee. In almost all acts of journalism—print, broadcast or online—and in all its organizational forms—mainstream corporate, alternative, citizen’s or public—the someone we are talking to is most generally an implied audience. The concept of the implied audience, the most general societal or market-wide audience the journalist’s institution assumes is being addressed, serves as a link across the final chapters. Each chapter focuses on different themes on how subaltern subjects are only rarely the audience a given author imagines for publication and yet are copiously written about.

Coverage of the subjects of immigration, of have-nots in the urban commons and of cultural and religious diversity is taken up as examples that are widely written about and not written to nor with. Three case studies look to demonstrate how legacy journalism fails to address marginal subjects as audiences by sampling legacy newspaper coverage on US immigration (restrictionists vs. expansionists) in Chapter 4, United States and Canadian urban have-nots in Chapter 5, and regulating cultural and religious differences in a secular society in Chapter 6. Each chapter provides a sampling of news analysis that identifies patterns of hospitality, conditional tolerance or recognition of subjects journalists frame for implied audiences in ways that help define the public conditions placed on welcoming, acceptance or rejection of others. Different types of direct and indirect reported speech in acts of journalism are examined in more detail showing how they avoid the narrow loophole through which meaning could be potentially consummated with the understanding of the subject’s superaddressee. I argue that distinct levels of support and conditions for support of groups need to be considered against the relative exclusion of their speech genres and the way stories are addressed to imaginary, but not fictional civic audiences most directly implied by each medias’ framing of issues.

My question is what happens to these subjects who are pre-assigned identities and reported on between the goal posts? These subjects are not the generally implied audiences journalists address even when they purport to tell their truths. Not only are they kept off the field but they aren’t even in the stands. I support the case for what others are calling a democratic bias in journalism by proposing a dialogic approach to subaltern or marginal subjects that keeps the more specific superaddressee within the bounds of their lifeworld. To this end, I defend the more controversial position that co-experience with sources in certain fields of news coverage; namely, marginal actors, means putting the journalist into the story. Such an approach would not necessarily make the act of journalism more adversarial than objective. However, it would impact the framing of different varieties of reported speech. It would be a journalism with and therefore about rather than a journalism about and therefore with.

The dialogic approach to acts of journalism, politics and media sociology is a preliminary response to a series of troubling questions that can be seen in this relation between radical equality and inequality. Writing inequality into immigration, the urban commons or cultural diversity for example, describes the multiple ways we are instructed to enact citizenship, speak a language, walk in the street, behave in a gathering, sustain a certain level of sobriety or avoid offensive clothing. Do conflicting views on where to place the posts between truth and democracy on these kinds of issues represent strength or weakness in politics, journalism and social science? Do we need this other way of theorizing politics, journalism and sociology? Will the possibility of democracy as a type of society survive the 3.0 Internet of Things—bots, avatars, clouds, big data analytics, computational propaganda, non-fungible-tokens and decentralized blockchain finance? As journalism adapts, will it reproduce even deeper civic and political inequality, or by a startling new necessity—step up to the frontline of everyday resistance and choose to work with an engagement toward democracy as a disruption of established order? These questions are made more urgent than ever given the current divide in liberal democratic societies.

Not that the positioning of posts between truth and democracy is ever anything but controversial, often tenuous, and even irrelevant at times—this is a moment where social scientists and pundits are continually perplexed as to how to explain the tenacity of deeply opposing truth claims that for many appear to threaten actual democracy to its core. Every day journalists talk about partisan division, divisions over sanitary policy, a new climate regime, intense demands for racial reckoning and slow-moving coups. Successive waves of deregulation, expanding inequality, climate change denial and forced migrations, are only some of the factors that are believed to contribute to the present malaise. If the question is asked what journalism is as an institution, what should it do, and how it imagines others think it should act under these circumstances, the first response is to define what news does and does not do.

News creation, design, organization and infrastructure are comprised of multiple overlapping materials, techniques, values, norms and roles that together form one side of an institutional mode of production. The other side of the news industry is seen in its relation to labor, capital, state, civil society and markets. The contradiction between these means and relations establishes conditions for what is creatively possible and what is impossible. Unlike pure fantasy entertainment, news is about the speedy delivery of reliable important information and opinion. The as it happens or timeliness of the message or opinion sits in a construct of something that has already happened, a technology, an organization and a series of decisions that have already been prepared. These means do help frame what news and its delivery can be like beginning at the first level of the reporter’s observation of an event. However, one reason it might be wrong to think about technology and design innovation as unique drivers of the news industry is that the secondary level of editorial judgment about truth is missing.

The difficulty of recognizing scores between the posts of truth and democracy and the fine line that once crossed separates freedom from equality or rule by the people’s representatives from authoritarian demagogues means the conventional question of what democracy needs from news scholars like Curran (2005) outlined only 15 years ago requires major revision. Shiny new technology and design make it easier to delegate editorial decisions to manipulative algorithms. The news has become much more divided or subsumed within entertainment structures, fragmented audiences and ideological camps. Gradually the always newer designs and technologies of news have allowed a fake version of itself to be exploited by one