On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus. That day, he put together a multimedia package of writings, photos and video, and sent it to NBC News. They aired selected photos and excerpts from the video, and read aloud portions of his writings. Over the next several days, they endured a firestorm of controversy, including complaints from victims' family members, from Virginia law enforcement, and from rival network heads. NBC's chief spokesperson in the affair was Steve Capus, president of NBC News. He defended his decision to air the material, but one of his concessions struck me funny at the time, and I copied it into my idea log. He said, "Sometimes good journalism is bad public relations."
What I study is the way professionals argue among themselves about the essence of the profession, and, in particular, about how the traits of an ideal professional come together to form an identity, a profile. Judges call this judicial temperament. Doctors all carry around an idealized cognitive model of the person who is most fully a doctor. I've been working to demonstrate, in several different fields, that when a controversy erupts inside a profession, it's possible to catch glimpses of that identity in the space between the arguments each side makes. I also believe that in those controversies, the identity is managed, renewed, re-created, reinforced, and sometimes radically altered.
Journalism is an interesting case, because they can't make up their minds whether they are a profession. The classic professions are doctors, lawyers, and the clergy. What makes an occupation a profession is tricky to pin down, but some of the more important markers are a commitment to serving the public, possession of arcane knowledge not available to everyone, an insistence on autonomy and freedom from outside judgment of the quality and appropriateness of the work, and heavy reliance upon colleagues.
Journalists do, typically, view themselves as public servants, do insist that only they are qualified to judge their work, do operate in collegial networks, but have kind of a nuanced position on arcane, secretive knowledge. It's a constitutive idea in journalism that a great journalist can explain anything to the readers or viewers, and that success is measured by effectiveness in that very task. The notion, then, that journalists are the guardians of something not everyone can understand (medicine, law, religious teaching) is not a terribly good fit. And that's where one of the more stubborn objections to calling journalism a profession comes in. Professions tend to include licensing: lawyers pass the bar, doctors are licensed, clergy are ordained. Journalists, however, have as part of their heritage the notion that anyone with a sharp eye, an ability to distill information down to the essence, and a flair for writing, can be a journalist. Formal training may be helpful, but is not necessary.
Public relations, on the other hand, is working itself into a frenzy trying to build all the trappings of a profession: certification, ethical codes, accrediting standards for colleges that have PR majors, and so forth. And PR has a relationship with journalism that reminds me of the tie between an adolescent and a parent: very troubled, very turbulent, but still unbreakable and even (at times) rewarding. Many people move from one occupation to the other, in both directions. And journalists have the same concerns as PR people: getting the message right, and doing the right thing for their various publics, and doing all of it ethically while staying afloat as a viable business enterprise. The difference is simply that journalists are the public version, and PR people take on private interests. And a number of commentators from inside the field say that when PR was new, underresourced, and not very powerful, and journalists were still resource-rich and in their element, the relationship actually worked quite well. But now that PR is a multi-billion dollar industry, while journalistic organizations are cutting budgets to the bone, the relationship has inverted, with PR people exercising more power and bringing more resources to bear on getting their way. Public trust in journalism is evaporating, which hurts both occupations, and the tie they share is plunging down below dysfunctional to downright toxic.
With that in mind, here's how the debate over the airing of Cho's video plays out.
Capus lays out the following arguments:
- This is plainly newsworthy. It is a look inside the mind of a mass murderer.
- It wasn't done recklessly; he and the entire staff agonized over whether they should release any of it, and if so, how much.
- Airing the video at all was inappropriate, since the ravings of a madman have no news value, and it encouraged other mentally ill people who might want their views aired on network TV to do the same thing.
- Even if airing the video once was defensible, airing it over and over again was just sensationalism.
A couple of bits out of the research I did into PR and journalism point toward some answers. One pair of authors talked about the need for journalism to adopt an ethic of care. On the way to their argument, they pointed out how journalists atomize their audience, emphasizing difference over connection (difference is what makes a story newsworthy) and being careful to keep all difference equal and unjudged. Another observes that journalists have always relied on sources to generate the content for their reporting, and that PR can be defined very, very simply as the professionalizing of sources. Since this is obviously a study in the use of an explosive source, one loaded with power but also loaded with danger, there's something to this angle. One author talks a good deal about journalism's "epistemic authority," especially in the context of the growing importance of marketing in news programming. Does something become news just because it draws attention? Is there a difference between need to know and want to know? Since NBC's threshold decision involved whether the video was news, the epistemic authority question is on the table. Yet another said what made a journalist a journalist was the ability to take an entire event and produce a condensed version that interested onlookers could digest without suffering information overload; that trait of journalism seems a good parallel to the "How often shall we re-air this?" decision, which went along with "Which excerpts shall we air in the first place?" In fact, since one major difference in journalism today and journalism in its earliest days is (a). broadcast and (b). 24 hour broadcast, I think I can make the argument that "how often can we re-broadcast this?" is a parallel issue to "how much shall we include?"
Okay. That's a mess. Let's see if I can untangle some of it:
- Professionalizing of sources.
- Epistemic authority.
- Distillation vs. frequency (editing).
- The atomized audience.
Hmm.
That's enough clean-up work that I can change tasks and go do something else. I might come back and try to fiddle more with this later today or tomorrow.
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