Do Newspapers Matter?

1. Do Newspapers Matter? • “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Thomas Jefferson • "A popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.” James Madison:

2. The impending “death” of newspapers is now a common cultural theme • How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers? • Last Newspaper Reader Cancels Subscription (THE ONION)

3. Some celebrate the “disruption,” “disaggregation” “democratization,” decentralization and de-professionalization of the news…and suggest universities will be next • For those arguing for the restructuring of higher education, the most common analogy is journalism. • They claim the changes are in both are “inevitable” • “The ‘decline’of journalism, as it evolved in the 20th century, is the inevitable result of digital technology, the dynamics of the marketplace, and the people's desire to have greater choice of, and control over, their sources of news and information. The impact of this epochal shift will be as strong on universities and their students as on society as a whole.”(Garrick Utley, President, Graduate Institute of International Relations and Commerce, SUNY)

4. “I believe we as individuals, and as society, will be much better informed in the future. The singular, overriding reason for this is that in the age of the Internet it is no longer possible for anyone to keep a "lid" on the freer flow of news and information. True, the decline of traditional journalism means there will be fewer reporters, foreign correspondents, and editors to select, report, and communicate news. This also means there will be fewer gatekeepers.” (Utley) • Beckett is slightly less celebratory, but is optimistic about the changes taking place.

5. In contrast to Beckett, a number of writers are concerned about the decline of newspapers. • “The newspaper world is slowly asphyxiating, starved for the oxygen of classified advertising and simultaneously kicked in the chest by a massive recession that is hastening the tombstones in the graveyard of newsprint.”(Watson, “Clay Shirky is Right: Newspapers’ death is Journalism’s Loss”)

6. “What has happened is that young people no longer see a need to keep up with the news….America is facing the greatest exodus of informed citizenry in its history.”(Brown, p. 7). • “While people may think they get their news from television or the Web, when it comes to [iron core] news, it is almost always newspapers that have done the actual reporting. Everything else is usually just a delivery system, and while resources for television news have plunged and news on commercial radio has all but disappeared, the real impact on iron core news has been from the economic ravaging of newspapers. Alex Jones, Losing the News

7. “The 148-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer will publish its final print edition this week. Huge cutbacks were approved by the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle …to save the 144-year-old daily. The Rocky Mountain News in Denver closed last month. The publishers of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and both the The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News filed for bankruptcy. The Christian Science Monitor has abandoned print, for a small online operation that keeps the name alive - for now [one of many that are now online-only] The survival of even The New York Times is openly debated.” (Tom Watson, “Clay Shirky is Right: Newspaper’s death is journalism’s loss”)

8. San Diego – journalists won Pulitzer prize for best investigative journalism in their expose of Randy “Duke” Cunningham (biggest congressional corruption scandal in history). Then they were fired – budget cuts. • TV Guide was just sold for one dollar - less than the price of a single copy. • The newsroom of The L.A. Times is being cut, leaving it half the size it was just seven years ago.

9. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just 5 years ago. • Publicly traded American newspapers lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years. That was before the current recession… • Only 19% of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising. As of 2004, newspapers were the least preferred source for news amongst the young.

10. The Internet has been a destructive force for many business models, but none threatens the basis of the  republic as much as the digital knife busily sawing at the fraying Achilles tendon of American newspapers. As an editorial in the Spokane Review (rather plaintively) asked: • "So as newspapers die, it's worth considering the effects on society. Who will tell the people what their institutions are doing? Who will ferret out the corruption? Who will fend off the legal challenges to public information? If no viable alternative emerges, what does that mean for our representative democracy? (Tom Watson, “Clay Shirky is Right: Newspapers’ death is journalism’s loss”)

11. “Crowdsourcing journalism is all the rage, but the idea of its widespread ascendancy and competence is the exclusive province of either deranged optimists or ideological cyberlibertarians; the vast populace will never produce great journalism - or even sufficient journalism of the kind that has nurtured our republic - any more than it will perform surgery on a widespread amateur basis, or turn out competent oil paintings by the millions.” Tom Watson, “Clay Shirky is Right: Newspapers’ death is journalism’s loss”

12. Newspapers and “Glocalization”? Until recently it’s been thought going local will save many newspapers. But recent stories talk of how even they are being outsourced to places like India. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/opinion/30dowd.html?hp – GLOCAL NEWS OUTSOURCED TO BANGALORE. • Macpherson, editor of Pasadena Now, outsourced Pasadena coverage to India. Indians are writing about everything from the Pasadena Christmas tree-lighting ceremony to kitchen remodeling to city debates about eliminating plastic shopping bags. • “Many newspapers are dead men walking. They’re going to be replaced by smaller, nimbler, multiple Internet-centric kinds of things such as what I’m pioneering.” • He thought, “Where can I get people who can write the word for less?” In a move that sounded so preposterous it became a Stephen Colbert skit, he put an ad on Craigslist for Indian reporters and got a flood of responses. • He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall. “I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”

13. “In October, Dean Singleton, The Associated Press’s chairman and the head of the MediaNews Group — which counts The Pasadena Star-News, The Denver Post and The Detroit News in its stable of 54 daily newspapers — told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that his company was looking into outsourcing almost every aspect of publishing, including possibly having one news desk for all of his papers, “maybe even offshore.” Noting that most preproduction work for MediaNews’s papers in California is already outsourced to India, cutting costs by 65 percent, Singleton advised, “If you need to offshore it, offshore it,” and said after the speech, “In today’s world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn’t matter.”

14. What alternatives – how do we remake journalism? “One of the most striking facts about modern political orders is that they lack institutionalized forums within which fundamental disagreements can be systematically explored and charted, let alone there being any attempt made to resolve them” - Alasdair MacIntyre, “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?”

15. Do we mourn changes to journalism? Mainstream media’s recent track record is not wonderful. Many argue that after 9-11 it did not provide the news citizens deserved • http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/transcript1.htmlBILL MOYERS interviews Walter Isaacson, CEO of CNNWHEN AMERICAN FORCES WENT AFTER THE TERRORIST BASES IN AFGHANISTAN, NETWORK AND CABLE NEWS REPORTED THE CIVILIAN CASUALTIES. • WALTER ISAACSON: We'd put it on the air and by nature of a 24-hour TV network, it was replaying over and over again. So, you would get phone calls. You would get advertisers. You would get the Administration. • BILL MOYERS: You said pressure from advertisers? • WALTER ISAACSON: Not direct pressure from advertisers, but big people in corporations were calling up and saying, "You're being anti-American here." • BILL MOYERS: SO ISAACSON SENT HIS STAFF A MEMO, LEAKED TO THE WASHINGTON POST: "IT SEEMS PERVERSE" HE SAID, "TO FOCUS TOO MUCH ON THE CASUALTIES OR HARDSHIP IN AFGHANISTAN." • WALTER ISAACSON: I felt if we put into context, we could alleviate the pressure of people saying, "Don't even show what's happening in Afghanistan." • BILL MOYERS: NEWSPAPERS WERE SQUEEZED, TOO. THIS ONE IN FLORIDA TOLD ITS EDITORS, "DO NOT USE PHOTOS ON PAGE 1A SHOWING CIVILIAN CASUALTIES... OUR SISTER PAPER ...HAS DONE SO AND RECEIVED HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS OF THREATENING E-MAILS ..." • AND THEN THERE WAS FOX NEWS: WHOSE CHIEF EXECUTIVE - THE VETERAN REPUBLICAN OPERATIVE AND MEDIA STRATEGIST ROGER AILES - HAD PRIVATELY URGED THE WHITE HOUSE TO USE THE HARSHEST MEASURES POSSIBLE AFTER 9/11... • WALTER ISSACSON: ... so we were caught between this patriotic fervor and a competitor who was using that to their advantage; they were pushing the fact that CNN was too liberal that we were sort of vaguely anti-American.

16. The Daily Show as model for critical, deliberative analysis • http://www.wwd.com/media-news/the-secret-weapon-of-the-daily-show-1837428“It has become commonplace to say “The Daily Show” does the work of the mainstream media — The New York Times, echoing a blog refrain, noted in August that the show “energetically tackled the big issues of the day…in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.”

17. Some questions being debated • Did newspapers bring this on themselves? • Why are they so mistrusted? • Why is there so little interest in them? • Why are young people turning away? • Should we be careful what we wish for? (they go away, and this exacerbates problems with existing media – cf. direct democracy in CA) • If newspapers go away, a) what, if anything can/ought to replace them, and b) do we need to promote new kinds of literacy to help students navigate the new media landscape?

18. What’s missing? • IMNSHO, Rhetorical literacy! • I would like to suggest that training in rhetoric and argumentation ought to be part of new media literacy. • Understanding argument is key to better reasoning/thinking, to mastering informal logic, and to the skills of deliberation and critical inquiry that are part of democratic life. • But must must be a reformed rhetorical studies, one far more attuned to the visual, to multimedia, and to the appeals decried by Postman – ethos and pathos. Some recent research in cognition and evolutionary psychology supports such a pov. (cf Jonathan Haidt)

19. Drucker also argues for this – although I’m not sure I entirely buy all her claims. • 1. Johanna Drucker, Professor, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. “Journalism looks poised to acquire the same anachronistic status as rhetoric. The analogy is not accidental. Never was rhetoric a more essential skill to undo the persuasive force of what feels increasingly like vigilante journalism. This monstrous form, a combination of libertarian self-interest and swarm mentality coupled with celebrity-pressured pay scales, is rising from the ashes of the profession along with a more subtly pernicious, much-touted model of the independent citizen-journalist. ““Academe and the Decline of News Media” http://chronicle.com/article/Academethe-Decline-of/49120/

20. “Here are a few basic principles for pedagogy. Practice enfranchisement and accountability. Teach the basic skills of rhetoric, the humanistic analysis of argument and interpretation. Show that the more something appears as natural, the more it is culturally constructed. Demonstrate that all cultural forms are made by someone for some purpose. Use rhetoric to reveal that all discourse is an argument serving someone's interests. Always ask, "Whose?" These principles are not a prescription for didactic moralism, but the foundation of informed democracy.” (Drucker)

21. “Stripped of the infrastructure that both protected and regulated their work, independent journalists are caught in the nightmare of a collapse in other infrastructure: schools, roads, health care, regulation of the environment for the public good—in short, the full ideology of profits over people that makes independent survival perilous.” • “The journalism schools founded in America in the 1920s and 30s were an outgrowth of the boom in social-science methodology meant as a rational contrast to the rising tides of European fascism and earlier effects of the Great War. The shock of watching populations persuaded (in part by propaganda and mass media) to align with forces counter to their own self-interests (not to mention those of a larger world) brought an urgency to the commitment of Harold Lasswell, Walter Lippmann, and others. They established standards of research, ethical and intellectual responsibility, drawing on John Dewey and other progressive philosophers.” (Drucker)

23. Identifying the genre tells us much about audience and purpose, and understanding the audience can tell us much about the context, purpose and the rhetorical situation. These terms are important places to start when interpreting and analyzing a text.

24. Genre • This image lacks genre, and thus its purpose, context and intended audience are hard to discern

25. Genre tells you a lot about a text – its intended audience, who the writer is, the context, purpose etc. It supplies much of the information needed to interpret this image. GENRE

26. The power of context Students used to salute the flag when reciting the pledge of allegiance.This changed after WWII.

27. Audience

29. Putting students through their P.A.C.E.S • Purpose/project • Argument • Claims • Evidence • Strategies

30. All of these categories can be broken down into smaller and smaller sub-categories, providing a comprehensive way of mapping reasoning and argumentation. • Once we have mapped out and “unpacked” the various aspects of argument, we can then draw upon a set of criteria for evaluating them.

31. Example • Arguments contain strategies • A common strategy is the rebuttal • There are many types of rebuttal. Three of the most common types are the “strategic concession,” the “refutation,” and the “demonstration of irrelevance.” • Once we’ve identified the refutation form of rebuttal, we can look at different kinds:

33. Evidence • Types of evidence (examples, anecdotes, experience, testimony, historical information, statistics, etc.) • Uses of evidence and issues of context, purpose, audience (validity and effectiveness) • Criteria for evaluating evidence • Sufficiency, typicality, accuracy, relevance (STAR) • Verifiability, scope, date, quality, “fit,” etc.

34. Warrants/chains reasoning • GASCAP – 6 common forms of reasoning • Generalization, analogy, sign, causal argument, authority, principle. • Many of the arguments offered for and against going to war in Iraq hinged on one of these forms of reasoning. • Each of these chains of reasoning can be broken down further, and we can consider criteria for evaluation. • If these chains of reasoning are misapplied, they can be described in terms of a fallacy.

35. Strategies • Ethos, pathos, logos, framing, definitions, categories, word choice, style as strategy, rebuttals, metadiscourse, organization, tropes, etc.

36. Framing • “To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation.” (Entman, 1993 p. 52) • The war on terror • Second mortgages vs. home equity loans • Bailout vs. rescue

37. Rhetoric and critical discourse analysis provide a powerful framework for analyzing other aspects of argument – at the level of words, syntax, style, discourse, organization, etc. E.g. agency, cultural narrative.

38. FALLACIES • Fallacies correlate with aspects of argument – they aren’t “different” from regular aspects of argumentation, but are misapplied, distorted or misused.

39. Ethos, pathos and Identification • Have we underestimated the importance of ethos, pathos, association and identification? • Places where Obama is doing worst, for example Texas, are also those areas where the largest groups of people think he is a Muslim. Eg almost 25% in Texas. “Not one of us.” • Perhaps something similar for Bush, with places that identify him as a fundamentalist or – insert favorite category – vote against him.

40. Evolutionary psychology and embodied cognition– the importance of emotion, value and morality in reasoning. • May need to be added to rhetorical study.

41. Universities need to give newspapers a bigger role? • KEY Op-Ed sources: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune. • Op-eds and op-ed columnists play an important role in debate about politics and public policy. Bloggers often respond to them, they shape debate on TV news shows, and many op-ed columnists also appear on tv news (and blog themselves). • EXAMPLE: http://www.dailyoped.com/ Displays 100+ major newspaper Op/Eds – great window onto the debates and key issues discussed by educated people around the country. Also, http://caglepost.com/.

42. Future Newspapers? • The following represent differing models of what more newspapers could look like in the future. Ask yourself how these differ from "regular" newspapers, and what major shifts you've noticed in newspapers during your lifetime. • http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/  Voice of San Diego • http://www.propublica.org/ProPublica • http://open.salon.com/cover.php Open Salon • http://www.huffingtonpost.com/  Huffington Post