“Why do you hate journalism?”

It’s a question I get sometimes from journalists – and students – who read my blog and papers or who listen to my lectures that ask cultural questions about journalism and news. It’s odd, these people say, that a journalist, a journalism instructor, and a researcher would write “bad things” about journalism.

But I love journalism, I tell them, and I don’t see exploring something you love through a critical lens as harming it. I don’t know if they believe me.

Journalism does not have one meaning and one purpose. Journalists don’t just report the news but are part of a community that furthers agreed-upon values and understandings of a given society. News provides our societies with ways of meaning-making, and journalism is an institution.

These thoughts can be such a stretch for some journalists – and scholars – that our conversations about newswork return to more normative explanations, descriptions that we are most comfortable with: That there are no other explanations than those that just are and news just happens and I don’t make news, I just cover it.

In my post about the recent Murdoch/News Corp., debacle, I argued that the widespread media coverage of the alleged hackings and other “unprofessional” actions may have also served the purpose of drawing boundaries of what is and what is not acceptable journalistic behavior.

These boundaries create what should be extreme actions of journalists to differentiate from everyday journalistic standards and practices, which have been constructed and changed over time – based upon cultural expectations. I saw the coverage as a cultural function, not just news of what happened today.

I got some interesting responses.

Verbatim from a journalism professor:

For every newspaper I worked for and/or admired and for every journalists I have ever worked with during my 40 years in the profession, the antics of Rupert Murdoch and his cabal of pseudo journalists and their faux journalism ARE a big deal. Their hacking practice would be a firing offense and reason to be shunned and ostracized by all real journalists. Just asked those who crossed the line – from Janet Cooke to Jayson Blair – and got run out of the profession for doing so.

Verbatim a former journalism student of mine:

Sadly, my view of journalism has been tarnished. I’ve come out of the School of Journalism more cynical about the occupation than I did when I went in for some of the reasons you write about and then some. In my opinion, journalism is no different than PR, politics, etc. It’s just as corrupt, if not more so, than many other occupations. Are there good journalists and media sources out there?

These are great comments, but I want to be more clear about what those of us who study the cultural aspect of newswork mean, why we do it, and how the use of normative explanations for journalism relate to deeper, cultural meanings. This is also in response to many other journalists I’ve spoken with who think that approaching journalism for its meanings means calling out journalists for their failures. (Admittedly, though, I do tend to do both.)

1. Critical analysis of news is not the same as attacking journalism. In Cultural Meanings of News, Dan Berkowitz explains that there are journalism critics and cultural scholars. The critic talks about “good” and “bad” journalism. They ask: “Was that ethical? Was that the right kind of coverage?

Cultural scholars, on the other hand want to connect to deeper meanings of the news. Their questions, then, may be: “What does this event say about perceptions of journalistic ethics?” “What does this coverage mean (in terms of a conceptual issue)?”

Those asking these questions are not attacking journalism. Nor are we attacking journalists.

Doing journalism is hard. I know. I’ve done it – and I still do.

But, until we start talking about the effect of journalism on larger society and its cultural values – not just in terms of politicians, police work, and access to democracy – we do more harm to journalism by ignoring its larger value.

2.  Journalism can’t be “corrupt,” but it is complex. Journalism is not just about presenting information or analysis. Media scholar Barbie Zelizer tells us in Taking Journalism Seriously that “…the cultural analysis of journalism views journalists not only as conveyers of information but also as producers of culture, who impart preference statements about what is good and bad, moral and amoral, and appropriate and inappropriate in the world” (p. 177).

In this view, it is hard to see journalism as “corrupt,” in that the meaning of news goes well beyond the everyday usage of the news for sports scores, locations of crime, and the latest political discourse in Washington or the statehouse. Perhaps, the ideological function of news that’s embedded within news texts, language, and the journalists’ use of sources, coverage of specific topics – and the exclusion of others – is the only element, within the cultural understandings of news, that may be considered at all “corrupt.”

But this is different than saying generally, journalists, themselves, are corrupt.

3. Journalists are not (totally) to blame. To say that reporters and editors are at fault for what critical analysis of news may present as social and cultural problems would be to rely upon normative and simple explanations of what news is. And, frankly, it means that we have missed the point of a cultural exploration.

Similarly, suggesting that those who work outside the traditional journalistic community should be “shunned and ostracized by all real journalists” reveals that there are “professional standards” that journalists “should” follow. It also suggests that there is something such as a “real journalist” in a “real profession.”

[This is a note for another time, but journalism is not a profession. It has no certification. It has no license or incentive to obey ethical or professional standards other than to curry favor with coworkers. The great thing about journalists (at least in the U.S.) is that anyone can be one, so what makes one “real?” What does the notion of something “real” mean?]

So instead of exploring deeper meanings of what they do, journalists tend to respond to critique with: “Do you know how much work I have to do? “What do you think we can do with all of these staff cuts?”

Both of these are formidable issues of newswork and do have an influence on the sociological and cultural meanings of journalism. But, there are other, larger, influences that shape the cuts of news staff, influence why and how individual reports respond to stories and select sources, and write how they do.

Tons of conversation among journalists is spent on issues of ethics and process, but they tend to ignore cultural meanings. Anything that suggests journalists do more than just report the news — such as producing cultural meanings — means that they are doing something wrong.

In a world where things are Right and Left, White and Black, Right and Wrong, you would think that journalists and their consumers would want to see that news means more.