What Are Journalists For?

Are journalists eyewitnesses who describe to a passive audience the actions of political insiders? Or are they catalysts to a public conversation and civic action? This debate is at the center of the development of ""public journalism,"" a movement that Rosen, former director of the Kettering Foundation's Project on Public Life and the Press, helped found. This partisan but fair-minded history examines both theory and practice, as Rosen recounts the movement's intellectual roots, its adoption by some newspapers and reaction within the profession, including criticism from heavyweights like the New Yorker's David Remnick and the New York Times's Max Frankel. Some examples of public journalism are clearly salutary: a newspaper refuses to accept political candidates' framing of a campaign and instead queries the candidates on vital issues; another supplements local crime coverage with regular charts, so trends are not distorted by the sensationalist focus on particular crimes. But many journalists remain skeptical of a theory that may lead newspapers to start recommending civic solutions in their news pages. Rosen distinguishes between advocating projects (e.g., building a new stadium) and engaging citizens without recommending specific goals, offering responses to critics that are mostly thoughtful but don't resolve, for example, how public journalism ought to approach subjects readers should care about but don't, like foreign news. It's disappointing that Rosen does not muse on journalism as practiced by the European press, the American alternative press or even opinion magazines like the Nation or the New Republic. While none play the civic role of a dominating daily newspaper, they certainly resist framing issues according to newspaper conventions of objectivity. (Nov.)