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请问谁能帮我造一下这个句子：attract public attention to sth.和be a better pilot of one's life
1.They want to attract public attention to this event.2.Now you must study so that you can be a better pilot of your life in the future.3.You shouldn't think about how to attract public attention to you all the time so that you can be a better pilot of your life in the future.
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nowadays,the heathy and weathy attract public attentian to .
扫描下载二维码Public Journalism and the Problem of Objectivity
Public Journalism and the Problem of Objectivity
By Philip Meyer
One measure of the discomfort that journalists
feel over the concept of public journalism is the great variety of names
given it, e.g. civic journalism, citizen journalism, community journalism,
or communitarian journalism. It's as though all who try some version of
it want to distance themselves from the questionable practices of the others.
At the core of these efforts, however, lies an interesting and potentially
useful new idea -- even though it may be an idea that is in serious danger
of being captured by people whom many of us would regard as the bad guys.
Part of the blame for the confusion must go to the early promoters of
public journalism who have steadfastly refused to give it a definition
or anything more than a vague theoretical structure. Because it is an idea
in development, they say, a definition would needlessly limit it. Maybe
so. But one consequence is that debating public journalism is like arguing
over a Rorschach test. Each sees in it the manifestation of his or her
fondest hopes or worst fears.
Anyone prepared to defend it, therefore, should be very specific about
what is being defended. The public journalism in which I am interested
in participating has the following defining elements:
A desire to rebuild a community's sense of itself. This amounts to
a long-delayed realization by newspapers that they and the cause of their
problems are parts of a single system. As John Gardner told a seminal meeting
of Knight-Ridder editorial writers in 1989, &Newspaper readership
is unlikely to turn upward as long as the sense of community continues
downward ... their fate is linked.&
A longer attention span. Instead of flitting from event to event, a
news medium should stay with a problem or issue -- even at the risk of
redundancy -- until it has focused community attention on all its aspects
and citizens can deliberate rationally about it.
A willingness to go deeply into explaining the systems that direct
our lives. Event-focused reporting is not just narrow in time, it is shallow
in depth. It does not help the audience see beyond the surface and into
the underlying sources of the community's problems.
More attention to the rational middle ground of issues and less attention
to extremes. In teaching statistical concepts to reporters, I notice how
irresistibly they are drawn to the tails of the normal distribution. They
sense news in those bizarre extremes. But in democratic decision making,
most of the people, and their actions, are found in the middle.
A preference for substance over tactics in covering political argument.
With his The Making of the President 1960, Theodore White inspired a genre
of political writing that treats an election as a sporting event. Every
move is evaluated, not for its effect on the community, but for its tactical
value to the political player. The motivation of politicians is a thing
worth knowing, but it is far from the only thing.
A desire to foster deliberation. Expressing your views is a good thing.
Making an earnest attempt to understand someone else's views is equally
important. Helping and encouraging members of a community to make that
earnest attempt at reciprocal understanding is a key aspect of the public
journalism we need.
Each of these six goals is consistent with the traditional notion of
the journalist as a free society's watchdog. Their purpose is to focus
the watchdog's effort in a time of information overload. This focus, not
the underlying function, is the new element. It is needed because of the
transition from a society where information was scarce to one where it
is in surplus. The new scarce good is public attention. Focusing the light
of public attention on any one problem long enough to spark discourse leading
to a solution is the object of public journalism. Therefore, a generic
term for the various strains of public journalism might be &focus
journalism& or &discourse journalism.&
Information overload has affected more than the mass media. It is has
led to a narrowing of individual concerns that has pushed libertarian individualism
-- the tradition that created the constitutional role of journalists --
beyond anything envisioned by its founding thinkers. Information technology
has allowed citizens to cocoon themselves into states of high specialization
and concern for their own needs and rights to the exclusion of the communities
of which they are a part. The first to notice this were moral philosophers
such as J&rgen Habermas in Germany and Robert Bellah in the USA. But
now social scientists are documenting it with data. Sociologist Amitai
Etzioni and political scientists Robert Putnam and Francis Fukuyama have
all written seminal books arguing that our economic, social and political
well-being are endangered by the loss of community associated with radical
and unrestrained individualism. Critics of public journalism claim that
it is merely a profit-maximizing strategy for newspapers, and they challenge
management to show that it is changing the bottom line. But this is not
a bottom-line issue. Public journalism, properly done, is an immediate
net cost to the news media that practice it. They put out the money and
the effort, and all they get in return is the possible distant salvation
of the communities that support them. Etzioni, in his The Spirit of Community,
argues as a liberal seeking to conserve liberal values. Over-emphasis on
one of those values, unrestrained individualism, he says, threatens the
It is that tension between core values and their current application
that is the source of the controversy among journalists over public journalism.
Our professional values come from the same enlightenment sources that gave
us libertarian individualism. In the second half of this century, journalism
has been tugged at by two competing sets of values, libertarian theory
on the one hand, and social responsibility theory on the other. The latter
was popularized by Robert M. Hutchins and his commission which published
A Free and Responsible Press in 1947. Most of us have preferred the libertarian
The reason lies in the historic power of the press and the community's
response to it. The power of a free press, as John Milton noticed from
the very beginning, is immense. As a result, everybody wants a piece of
it. Not everybody can own a printing press, but everybody can try to gain
some influence over those who do. The variety of methods is well known:
advertiser pressure, establishing a personal relationship with the editor
or publisher, litigation or the threat of litigation, and the public relations
The latter is especially irritating to we news people. Which of us has
not felt some twinge of resentment upon noticing some flack who dresses
better than we and drives a nicer car and earns that living by selling
influence that he or she claims to wield over us? The possibility that
the influence is real only makes it worse. It's created by identifying
our soft spots, our need to get news into the paper or on the air cheaply
and easily and therefore supplying the handouts or the pseudo-events that
make such economies possible.
To counter these threats to our independence, we have created social,
moral, and ideological barriers that define news people as a race apart,
distant, detached, and uninfluenced by anything but a dogged desire to
discover and impart the truth regardless of its consequences. That stance
fits nicely with enlightenment individualism. Social responsibility theory
in the 1950s and public journalism today are perceived as threats to that
independence.
Moral philosophers have a word for this stance: nonconsequentialism.
It refers to Immanuel Kant's notion that a good rule is more important
than its consequences. Thus we prefer to tell the truth and let the chips
give light and the people will find their own way.
Our rule is find the facts and get them out. Period.
Such unbending absolutism has a side benefit that is important to our
business. An absolutist can make decisions quickly. A moral dilemma arises,
you pull out the appropriate rule, apply it, and the problem is gone. You
go back to getting out that day's paper or broadcast. Other ethical systems
require a lot of weighing and judging. We don't have time to run a cost-benefit
analysis on every decision.
This good fit of individual libertarian theory with the ability to do
our jobs efficiently and fairly has made us justifiably fond of the theory
and its philosophical underpinnings. It kept our predecessors from embracing
social responsibility theory when the Hutchins Commission first advanced
it, and it is making many of us suspicious of public journalism. And the
suspicion is justified.
Because of the absence of a well-formed theory of public journalism
or even a definition, it can easily become camouflage for all the myriad
special interests that want to get a piece of the power of the media. The
Chamber of Commerce wants to tear up a park to build a convention center?
Support it in the name of public journalism. You don't know what issues
to cover in the coming election? Let the readers, while under the spell
of the most vocal interest groups, vote on it in a poll commissioned in
the name of public journalism. Is reporting on the local crime problem
bad for retail business? Suppress it in the name of public journalism.
All of this is theory. I do not have direct personal knowledge of any
news organization that is doing any of these things and calling it public
journalism. I do know, however, that as new ideas diffuse throughout our
business, they tend to get cheaper and cruder in application -- like the
USA Today weather map. That map was a wonderfully creative improvement
on traditional weather reporting, and the editors decided to let it run
the full width of the page. But the aspect ratio of a true map of the USA
gives it too much depth. To save space, the artist tilted the map so that
it would fit in less vertical space. To alert readers to this distortion,
the tilt was emphasized by the addition of a three-dimensional edge at
the bottom. Now weather pages in newspapers throughout the world are illustrated
by imitators who never got the point. They show small maps, normal aspect
ratios -- and the USA Today three-dimensional edge.
Public journalism will also have imitators who never get the point.
Adding to the certainty of this proposition is the cruel fact that corruptions
of public journalism are a lot cheaper than the real thing. Yielding to
pressure to be a community booster is easy and cheap. Gathering and presenting
the facts that stimulate public deliberation is difficult and expensive.
How expensive? Let me count two of the ways.
You can't do public journalism without a certain amount of public opinion
research. I am not referring to the traditional kind of polling that keeps
score in a political campaign or that provides an informal referendum on
a specific issue. Such polls are sometimes worth doing, but they are as
likely to discourage deliberation as encourage it. If a pre-election poll
is presented as implying that the voters have decided and the campaign
is over, it can discourage further deliberation. Paradoxically, frequent
polls can help by arousing interest, calling attention to the volatility
of voter preferences, and diminishing the importance of any single poll.
Issue polls can help the deliberation process if they concentrate on subsets
of the population. Too many news media hit a topic with a poll once and
then retire from the scene as if the majority preference had settled everything
and no more needed to be said. In fact, the majority probably has not thought
about the issue very much, and the top-of-the-head reaction collected in
a poll can be quite different from what would result from serious thought
and deliberation. The best political leaders use such polls not to let
the public tell it what to do but to determine the starting point for bringing
the public up to speed in understanding the issue. Another public journalism
application of issue polls is to help persons of different views understand
one another, to enable the public to practice what philosopher Habermas
calls &discourse ethics,& i.e. a genuine willingness to work
to understand what and how one's opponents are thinking. (Habermas is the
source of some of Daniel Yankelovich's ideas in Coming to Public Judgment.
Yankelovich in turn inspired W. Davis Merritt when he wrote Public Journalism
and Public Life: Why Telling the News is Not Enough.) Some of the first
applications of Precision Journalism in the 1960s were polls that highlighted
the diversity within new political movements that traditional reporting
viewed as monolithic, e.g. the civil rights movement and the youthful anti-war
protests. Such polls helped citizens with different experiences and interests
understand one another. So true public journalism requires multiple polls
rather than one-shot polls or no polls at all. It also makes use of focus
groups to generate ideas and associations of ideas for things to ask about
that might not have occurred to editors and reporters thinking alone in
their cubicles. Polls and focus groups cost money.
You can't do public journalism without a commitment to reporting at
a depth that gets to structural explanations for the things that happen
in community. Public deliberation needs a common core of facts to deliberate
about. Such reporting takes some very specialized skills. Several years
ago, Peter M. Senge wrote an article in Sloan Management Review arguing
that business organizations should abandon top-down directives for a process
of continuous learning in which the people in the field share perceptions
and learn from each other. He was talking about leadership in business
organizations, and his article was called &The Leader's New Work:
Building Learning Organizations.& But the same kind of a case can
be made for community survival, or even for society's survival. Our communities
need to become deliberating, learning communities, and our media can help
them do so by showing citizens how to see beyond the surface events and
into the underlying causes of their problems. They need to see, in Senge's
words, &new possibilities for shaping the future.& To see these
possibilities, he said, we need to view reality at three different levels
of abstraction:
Structures
Most news coverage is about events because events are cheap and easy
to cover. Television's preference for bloody images is not due to cynical
manipulation of primitive tastes so much as the fact that it doesn't take
a lot in the way of money or brains to chase an ambulance and shoot what
it arrives at. Newspapers like stenographic coverage of public meetings
because it is a cheap and relatively mindless way to fill up white space.
Such coverage does not bother to relate one event to another. Each day
is an information-tight compartment unrelated to all the other days.
At Senge's second level of abstracting information, perceiving patterns,
a little more skill is called for. In the 1970s, the Philadelphia Inquirer
pioneered in creating a trends desk. Changes across time or across physical
distance create patterns that we can perceive and act on to head off trouble
or grasp opportunities.
The third level is the hardest to discover and to communicate: the underlying
systemic structure that causes the events that form the patterns. If the
reporters who can do that were paid more, there would be more of them.
Jim Steele and Don Barlett pulled it off with the Philadelphia Inquirer's
blockbuster America: What Went Wrong? Steve Doig of The Miami Herald did
it when he found the direct association between corrupt building inspection
and damage from Hurricane Andrew.
This new breed of reporters is capable of supplying us with the public
journalism we need and the solution to its objectivity problem. This solution
requires changing the definition of objectivity a little bit, but that's
okay. The old one was never very good anyway.
Objectivity, as defined by the knee-jerk, absolutist school of media
ethics, means standing so far from the community that you see all events
and all viewpoints as equally distant and important -- or unimportant.
It is implemented by giving equal weight to all viewpoints and assertions
--or, if not, all an interesting variety within a socially acceptable spectrum.
The result is a laying out of facts in a sterile, noncommittal manner,
and then standing back to &let the reader decide& which view
This, in effect, is objectivity of result, defining objectivity not
by the way we go about our business of gathering and interpreting the news,
but by what we put in the paper. It can be measured out: so many lines
for this group, so many for that. In an effort to be fair, we sprinkle
our resources to produce as even an effect as we can.
Critics of objectivity get a lot to chew on when that is the definition.
And one form of reaction is to declare that objectivity is impossible.
No matter how delicately we sprinkle, we'll never get it right. Might as
well be honest about it, these critics say, listen to our subjective inner
voices, and write and report from a clearly stated point of view. Some
journalists who think that way will surely seize on public journalism as
an excuse to do it.
And even the advocates of public journalism, Davis Merritt in particular,
admit that it is a hazard. When you start caring about how public debate
goes, even if you don't prefer a particular outcome, you start making subjective
decisions about what to focus on and when. Journalistic passivity is abandoned.
One solution is to draw a line somewhere on the slippery slope, be subjective
up to that point, and then stop.
There is a better solution, and it is already being adopted by reporters
who use data-intense methods. Investigative reporters like Barlett and
Steele in Philadelphia and Steve Doig in Miami practice objectivity of
method, not objectivity of result. Barlett and Steele are mad as hell about
the way things are going in America, and their writing shows it. A piece
of Doig's roof was torn off by Andrew, and he wasn't happy about that.
But both reporting projects followed the objective scientific standard
of replicability. They informed their investigations with theories about
the underlying causes of events. They developed operational tests of those
theories. And they documented the steps in executing their tests with a
paper trail that any other investigator could find and follow and come
out with the same results.
This is scientific method applied to the practice of journalism. One
of its beauties is that it requires no departure at all from the enlightenment
philosophy that gave us our stance of prickly individualism. The political
philosophers of the eighteenth century derived their ideas from the development
of scientific method. Free expression should be encouraged, John Milton
argued, because new things are learned every day, and an idea that seems
false now might be proved true tomorrow. And even a false idea could contain
a kernel of truth that, exposed to light, would grow and prevail.
Scientific method was developed to protect human investigators from
the unconscious tricks of self-deception that afflict us all. Its procedures
of peer review, replicability, and falsifiable hypotheses protect journalists
as well, including those who practice public journalism.
That's why there is a potential connection between computer-assisted
investigative reporting and public journalism. To get at the structural
analyses that will fuel public deliberation, we need data-rich investigation.
And to manage large bodies of data, we need not only computers but a disciplined
method that allows us to ask a question of the data in a way that we will
not be fooled by answer.
With such a capability, we can help our communities find the structural
leverage points that lead to opportunity or disaster. For example, ordinary
reporting is not very good at focusing on situations where there is a long
time lag between a policy and its consequences. Dade County, through both
corruption and weakening of regulations, started diluting its hurricane
protection standards in the 1960s. The consequences were not perceived
until Andrew hit in 1994. Even then, the connection might not have been
made without Steve Doig's computer and his ability to discover statistical
relationships.
The proper goal of public journalism is to create a learning community,
one that discusses issues, not just on the basis of emotion but on facts
about how things work. Abandoning the traditional stance of journalistic
objectivity to practice public journalism need not be a bad thing if we
can substitute objectivity of journalistic method. It's a better standard
anyway, and it can keep us honest.
Without such discipline, public journalism could take us down the same
roads being explored by in academe by philosphers of the post-modern persuasion.
They, too, are tired of objectivity. Truth, they argue, is &socially
constructed.& Whether a proposition is objectivley true is less important
than whether it deserves to be true. They will make allowances for the
need for objectivity in the hard sciences like physics and chemistry but
disallow it in the soft sciences like economics or sociology. The quest
for truth has become that politicized.
The parallel between post-modern philosophy and existing and potential
developments in journalism is worth following. Journalists and academics
are both pledged to discover and impart the truth. Both take their missions
from the same eighteenth century enlightenment philosophy. And both are
motivated to use the light of truth to help the oppressed and the downtrodden.
In academic philosophy, this desire to apply knowledge in a constructive
way has led some to reject empirical investigation in favor of something
called &critical theory.& Based loosely on Karl Marx's Critique
of Political Economy and Freud's notion of the unconscious, it was elaborated
by a series of German thinkers from the 1920s to the present. Its premise
is that the way we think about the world and our individual places in it
is the result of domination and coercion by the powerful status quo. When
extreme advocates of various causes -- radical feminists, for example --
adopt this way of thinking, the truth of a proposition becomes less important
than its usefulness in framing a new and presumably liberating ideology.
You can see the parallel with advocacy journalists who don't mind coloring
the facts or even making them up to arrive at what they perceive as a &higher
One of the potential problems for public journalism is that some of
its philosophical roots are in this same easily-perverted field of critical
theory. Habermas argues for an &emancipatory mode& of knowledge
as opposed to traditional scientific knowledge, and the way to get to it,
he says is through public discourse that overcomes the barriers of culture,
language, social class and geography. The result will be a kind of truth
that is different and in some ways better than the truth arrived at by
more objective methods. He does not himself argue that the &emancipatory&
mode should replace rather than supplement the scientific mode, but he
has enthusiastic followers who do.
In the media business, we suffer from the same pressures, even though
we may be only dimly aware of their philosophical origins. The fact that
a good idea is going to be seized and run into the ground by people with
narrow interests should not freeze us into a position of unacceptance of
the idea. We can satisfy our macho desire for cold facts by noting that
some of the ideas that came from the philosophers behind public journalism
have been verified by empirical social scientists using methods that would
be quite familiar to a good investigative journalist. The importance of
reciprocal trust and understanding that Habermas stresses in his 1983 Moral
Consciousness and Communicative Action was emprically and convincingly
verified in terms of political and economic value by Robert Putnam in Making
Democracy Work (1994).
The concept of a new kind of knowledge can be helpful if it supplements
rather than displaces the scientific tradition. The notion of public journalism
has the potential for adding value to the work we do as investigative reporters
if it does not displace our quest for empirical fact but instead supplements
and informs that quest. There is indeed more than one way of knowing. And
the objectively verifiable knowledge produced by investigative journalists
will never be of much use unless the public attends to it and arrives,
through extended discourse and deliberation, at the kind of gut-level awareness
that Habermas calls &emancipatory.&
Therefore, let us not reject public journalism. Investigative reporting
and editing can save it from its potential abusers by applying to it the
discipline of method. And the focus provided by public journalism can keep
the fruits of investigative reporting and editing from being lost in the
fuzzy buzz of information overload. Public journalism and investigative
journalism need one another, and if we recognize that we have a chance
of preserving our cherished First Amendment traditions and responsibilities.
is a Knight Professor
at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication,
This article is based
on a talk given to the IRE conference on computer assisted reporting in
in September 1995.}