Post-Bowden Post-journalism

This weekend, I read Mark Bowden's "The Story Behind the Story" in the latest issue of The Atlantic. In reading some of the follow-up blog posts this week, I've become a little obsessed with the term post-journalism.

Bowden spends a majority of his article explaining how footage used to attack Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor — the now infamous "wise Latina" and courts-make-policy comments — can be traced back to a couple of conservative bloggers who found those clips, without pay, just because they was wanted to dig a little deeper into Obama's choice for the court.

Bowden writes that this approach to reporting strikes him as:

post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger’s role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.

National debate becomes more like a trial, where the objective is to score points against your opponent rather than to work toward compromise. Politics is, he says, really the art of finding the middle ground, but Bowden worries that without the stabilizing effect of objective journalism "politics becomes blood sport."

---

Maybe my fascination with the prefixed terminology he's chosen is a product of my background in literary theory. In that field, every idea of the past 200 years eventually transcended itself and got the prefix. Colonialism became post-colonialism. Structuralism began poststructuralism, and modernism gave us postmodernism and even post-postmodernism (depending on who you talk to.)

By the way, "post-" is a prefix commonly attached to ideas to signify transcendence. The post-whatever not only comes after the whatever but also surpasses it in some or all ways. Yet it still has the name of the original whatever sewn into it, guaranteeing that the post-whatever can never fully separate itself from the original whatever. Note that neither "transcend" nor "surpass" should imply that the original has been improved upon.

I questioned the prefix back in grad school because it seemed like institutional jargon, special terminology designed to make its users feel smart. I'm inclined to think that "post-journalism" exists for the same reason, but that didn't stop me from looking into its history a bit.

Back in November 2008, right after Obama won the presidential election, the conservative National Review posted an editorial warning us that the erosion of objectivity in the news media wouldn't leave us anybody trustworthy to report on Obama's no-doubt inevitable screw-ups.

In short, we live now in the Age of Post-Journalism. All that was before is now over, as this generation of journalists voluntarily destroyed the hallowed notion of objectivity and they will have no idea quite how to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

In February, the New York Observer used the prefix too in an interview with Alex Mawbrey, a professor at Queensborough Community College (who I'm not convinced is a real person). Mawbrey told the Observer that in his view of journalism's future, citizens will take time out of their lives to cover stories because the stories matter to them, not because an editor assigned it to them. Of professional writers, he said

No doubt many of them will continue writing, but in a new style—what I call “post-journalism.” No longer “objective observers,” they will be writers-as-workers. This will lead to a rebirth of American reporting.

Just this week, The New York Times, writing in the post-Bowden post-journalism era, gives us a clear definition of their view of post-journalism:

Welcome to the “post-journalistic” age, in which ideologues now provide the “reporting” that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. “The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition.”

Sometime between February and now, the importance of the erosion of objectivity in journalism ruffled some feathers. The tone has shifted from innocent and elegiac to confrontational. The National Review's piece treats it subtly; the Observer's take is humorous. But Bowden and the Times are using loaded terms like "ideologue," "propaganda," "battle" and "ammunition."

No doubt there are more articles about post-journalism out there than these four, and maybe what I'm seeing as a trend isn't. Admittedly, my sample size is pretty small. But I still wonder whether the Atlantic and Times' stronger words are the result of an increasing sense of desperation among the journalists out there who struggle against the tide of partisan reporting.

Related posts:

1. On Michael Hirschorn and the future of daily print journalism
2. Paul Graham and ‘post-medium’ publishing
3. Reporter at NY Post admits that company policy says not to credit bloggers
4. Consider the journalism on Twitter, not whether Twitter is journalism
5. Pat Thornton: Journalism needs to get down and dirty