Journalism and the Western tradition
Keith Windschuttle
Australian Journalism Review
21, 1, July 1999
Keynote address to Journalism Education Association annual conference, Central Queensland University, Yepoon, December 1998

 

Journalism has played a prominent role in Western culture for a very long time. So far, however, we lack a good account of the whole of its history, from its origins to the present day. The result of this void at the core of the literature is that discussion about the nature of journalism is not well grounded, and the area abounds in unfounded speculations and myths derived from theory, rather than findings derived from empirical research. One contemporary myth is the view of theorists from the field of cultural studies that journalism is characterised most by its relationship with modernity. For instance, the theorist John Hartley claims: 'Journalism is the sense-making practice of modernity (the condition) and populariser of modernism (the ideology).' He adds that it is 'a product and promoter of modern life, and is unknown in traditional societies.'

So much a feature of modernity is journalism that it is easy to describe each in terms of the other -- both journalism and modernity are products of European (and Euro-sourced) societies over the last three or four centuries; both are associated with the development of exploration, scientific thought, industrialisation, political emancipation, and imperial expansion. Both promote notions of freedom, progress, and universal enlightenment, and are associated with the breakdown of traditional knowledges and their hierarchies, and their replacement with abstract bonds of virtual communities, which are linked by their media. Journalism and modernity are marked by the co-development of capitalisation and consumerism, [and] market expansion… (Hartley, 1996: 21)

Despite the fact that Hartley does not support these claims with any scholarly references, the thesis is, on the face of it, quite plausible. To exist as we know it, journalism has to be able to speak freely. It especially has to be free of the dictates of the two great forces of authority in Western history, the church and the state. This is an attribute it shares with science. Since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the modern era has certainly been characterised by the widespread demand for freedom of expression, and this in turn has been closely associated with the some of the other things listed by Hartley: exploration, science, industrialisation and political emancipation.

However, the idea that journalism is essentially modern is contested by the fact that there are examples of journalism that long pre-date the modern era, and that it is possible to identify a tradition of journalistic writing that extends back almost to the origins of Western civilisation. While journalism certainly expanded enormously because of the demand for freedom of speech that arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and because of the mechanisation of printing during the industrial revolution, it is a genre of writing that is much older than either of these developments. In fact, both journalism and the production of daily news reports are more than two thousand years old.

One of the problems of Hartley's thesis is that it conflates journalism with newspapers. While the two largely go together in the modern period, it is important to recognise that not all journalism is published in newspapers. Journalism is also contained in books, pamphlets, newssheets, diaries and journals. Several of these forms predate the invention of printing. What I want to do in this paper is to trace the separate origins of journalism and newspapers. My objective is not simply to take the cheap shot that the cultural studies theorists have got it all wrong yet again but, more importantly, to suggest an alternative account of journalism. It is something different to, and far more grand than, contemporary media theorists regard it. In turn, this alternative view suggests a quite different approach to both journalism education and to research into journalism.

The origins of journalism lie in exactly the same place as the origins of history. The first true historian is widely acknowledged as Thucydides, the Athenian who wrote The History of the Peloponnesian War some time between 424 and 400 BC. The work of another Greek author, Herodotus, called The Histories, was actually composed earlier, around 446 BC, but much of Herodotus's writing is actually part of an older oral story-telling tradition. Herodotus combined tales of his travels to Persia and Egypt with accounts of heroic military deeds in the wars between the Greeks and the Persians. His stories included a certain amount of myth and fable about the predictions of oracles and the intervention of the gods. All human cultures have told stories of this mythical kind in order to shore up their morale, to affirm their sense of self-worth and to record their place in the cosmos. However, Thucydides consciously differentiated his own approach from mythology. The early chapters of his work are history proper, that is, they describe relations between the Greek city states long before the Peloponnesian war started and they attempt to define its causes. The author says:

I do not think that one will be far wrong in accepting the conclusions I have reached from the evidence which I have put forward. It is better evidence than that of the poets, who exaggerate the importance of their themes, or of the prose chroniclers, who are less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their public, whose authorities cannot be checked, and whose subject-matter, owing to the passage of time, is mostly lost in unreliable streams of mythology. We may claim instead to have used only the plainest evidence and to have reached the conclusions which are reasonably accurate, considering that we have been dealing with ancient history. (Thucydides, 1972: 47)

However, most of his work, The History of the Peloponnesian War, is not a history of past events but is, rather, a running commentary on the course of the war as it unfolded. Thucydides was himself involved in the action and rose to the rank of general, having at one stage command of a squadron of Athenian ships. He says he began making notes about the war as soon as it started because he recognised that both Athens and Sparta were then at the height of their power and that the outcome of the war would decide who would emerge as the dominant force among the Greeks. This is how he describes his method:

And with regard to my factual reporting of events of the war, I have made it a principle not to write down the first story that came my way, and not even to be guided by my own general impressions: either I was present myself at the events which I have described or else I have heard of them from eye-witnesses whose reports I have checked with as much thoroughness as possible. Not that even so the truth was easy to discover: different eye-witnesses give different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or the other or else from imperfect memories. (Thucydides, 1972: 48)

This is, on almost any definition of the concept, a description of the research methodology of journalism. Let me give one example of his reporting. In 430 BC, Athens was stricken by a plague which decimated the population and was a major factor in its eventual defeat. Thucydides' description of the symptoms of those who suffered from the disease is good enough for modern medical specialists to diagnose it as either pneumonic or bubonic plague. Here he describes the scene on the streets of the city:

A factor which made matters much worse than they were already was the removal of people from the country into the city, and this particularly affected the incomers. There were no houses for them, and, living as they did during the hot season in badly ventilated huts, they died like flies. The bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about in the streets or flocking around the fountains in their desire for water. The temples in which they took up their quarters were full of the dead bodies of people who had died inside them. For the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or of law. All the funeral ceremonies which used to be observed were now disorganised, and they buried the dead as best they could. Many people, lacking the necessary means of burial because so many deaths had already occurred in their households, adopted the most shameless methods. They would arrive first at a funeral pyre that had been made by others, put their own dead upon it and set it alight; or, finding another pyre burning, they would throw the corpse they were carrying on top of the other one and go away. (Thucydides, 1972: 155)

This is all first-hand observation and, to my mind, there is no doubt it is journalism. In short, as well as the first historian, Thucydides should be recognised as the first journalist and his History of the Peloponnesian War acknowledged as the first work in the tradition that eventually produced the newspaper and magazine writing of the modern era.

There is one aspect of this writing, however, that is quite out of step with subsequent journalistic practice. This is Thucydides' reporting of speeches. One of the speeches he recorded in this work is perhaps the most influential in all of Western culture. This is the funeral oration of Pericles given at the burying of a group of Athenian soldiers killed in battle. Pericles begins by describing the principles of government bequeathed by the Athenian forefathers, especially those of democracy and equality before the law, for which the dead had fought. It is a brief but very eloquent speech. It provided the model for Abraham Lincoln's equally powerful funeral oration at Gettysburg. However, unlike Lincoln, Pericles did not write his speech himself. Thucydides describes his method as follows:

In this history, I have made use of set speeches some of which were delivered just before and others during the war. I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches which I listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation. (Thucydides, 1972: 47)

In writing this passage, the author himself is acknowledging that the practice is a breach of his own rules about reporting only what he actually witnessed. He was, in fact, falling back on a dramatic convention. In Greek tragedy, for instance, Aristotle said the job of the poet was to describe events as they might have been or ought to have been 'from probability or necessity', (Aristotle: Poetics, 9) that is, to make the events fit the drama. So, in reporting speeches, Thucydides' certainly deviated from his own standards of 'providing better evidence than that of the poets'. In the event, however, the long-term consequence was not to licence this practice. It produced a number of Greek and Roman critics who argued that this was the major flaw in the work and should not be emulated by others. (Finley, 1972: 25-9) In other words, the eventual legacy of the history was the opposite of the author's own practice of inventing his speeches.

Like most war correspondents over the past two thousand years, Thucydides reported the contest from his own side. Even though in the 1990s there have been examples of American journalists in Baghdad acting as third parties and reporting from their own country's enemy, in most cases in the history of war reporting, the only logistical and political possibility for journalists has been to work from their own side. Nonetheless, Thucydides' work is notable for its efforts to overcome the dictates of perspective. He writes with a conspicuous lack of cheerleading for the Athenian cause. His main aim is to see the objectives and mistakes of all the participants. He wrote:

And it may well be that my history will seem less easy to read because of the absence in it of a romantic element. It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever. (Thucydides, 1972: 48)

This aim of expelling partisanship from his work is complemented by his attitude towards religion. Thucydides discusses religion in terms of what people at the time said about the actions of the gods or how they interpreted the omens for their future. Unlike other contemporary authors such as Herodotus, he does not describe how the gods actually intervened in events or how the omens actually foretold what would occur. In short, he has a secular approach to religious reporting. He reports religious beliefs without endorsing them. In doing this, he makes a clean break from the genre of mythology. Rather than aiming to boost Greek self-esteem, his decision to pursue the truth at any cost exposed how fragile was their existence. He showed that their heroes could not guarantee their victories, their oracles could not foretell their future and their gods did not ensure their fortunes. Myth had been comforting but this new form of writing was bracing. Taken together, his distancing of himself from his own side in the war and from the prevailing religion meant Thucydides took a profoundly revolutionary step for both himself and for the cultural legacy his work has bequeathed. No other culture had ever had such an idea before and, until the modern era, very few cultures outside the West had ever been able to bring it off.

The idea of being able to detach yourself from your own culture, to look down, as it were, upon yourself and to be a critic of your own practice, is a characteristically Western notion and, indeed, one of the great strengths of Western culture -- possibly even its greatest strength. We now take this notion -- the attempt to be culturally objective and self-critical, rather than subjective and self-defensive -- so much for granted that we assume it is a perfectly natural thing to do, whereas to many other cultures it has long been something shocking, and, in some cases, remains shocking. This is why those postmodernists who deride the idea of objectivity, who claim that all cultural products are necessarily subjective and culturally relative, should not be allowed to get away as unscathed as they have in recent years. They would not only lead us into an intellectual cocoon from where we would find it difficult to properly understand or relate to other cultures, but they would deny us one of the most powerful intellectual tools of our own cultural inheritance.

Unfortunately, most of the ancient Greek histories written after Thucydides have been lost so we cannot tell how many of them contained the kind of journalism that he founded. The same is true of the Roman histories which, like most of Rome's cultural artefacts, were inherited from the Greeks. However, the works of the Roman author Tacitus make it clear that the Greek tradition of providing a running commentary on contemporary events was alive and well in the first century AD. Tacitus wrote the Histories, which is account of the Roman emperors who reigned from 68 AD to 96 AD, that is, during most of his adult life. This is the equivalent in timescale of someone today writing a history of Australian Prime Ministers from Whitlam to Keating. Tacitus also wrote the Annals of Imperial Rome which is actually more history than journalism since it covers the period from 14 AD to the death of Nero in 68 AD when the author was 13 years old. In the Annals, Tacitus is much more of a moralist and is far less dispassionate than Thucydides. For instance, he is scandalised by the sexual profligacy of Nero. He describes one Roman banquet:

The entertainment took place on a raft constructed on Marcus Agrippa's lake. It was towed about by other vessels, with gold and ivory fittings. Their rowers were degenerates, assorted according to age and vice… On the quays were brothels stocked with high-ranking ladies. Opposite them could be seen naked prostitutes, indecently posturing and gesturing. At nightfall the woods and houses nearby echoed with singing and blazed with lights. Nero was already corrupted by every lust, natural and unnatural. But he now refuted any surmises that no further degradation was possible for him. For a few days later he went through a formal wedding ceremony with one of the perverted gang called Pythagoras. The emperor, in the presence of witnesses, put on the bridal veil. Dowry, marriage bed, wedding torches, all were there. (Tacitus: 1956: 351)

Journalism is a very broad church and some of its denominations have included forms of writing laden with opinions and value judgements. As long as writing is based on observation and evidence, as this passage from Tacitus surely is, it deserves the name of journalism, opinionated though it might be. However, there are other parts of the Annals, such as the description of the great fire of Rome during the reign of Nero, which are much closer to the descriptive, action-based journalism that has always constituted the basic fare of the daily press.

Now started the most terrible and destructive fire which Rome had ever experienced. It began in the Circus, where it adjoins the hills. Breaking out in shops selling inflammable goods, and fanned by the wind, the conflagration instantly grew and swept the whole length of the Circus. There were no walled mansions or temples, or any other obstructions which could arrest it. First, the fire swept violently over the level spaces. Then it climbed the hills -- but returned to ravage the lower ground again. It outstripped every counter-measure. The ancient city's narrow and winding streets and irregular blocks encouraged its progress. Terrified, shrieking women, helpless old and young, people intent on their own safety, people unselfishly supporting invalids or waiting for them, fugitives and lingerers alike-all heightened the confusion. (Tacitus, 1956: 351)

During the dark ages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the remains of Greek and Roman culture were preserved within Christian monasteries. Much of the history that was written between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries was church history, especially the lives of popes and the lives of saints. Although this material does contain some eyewitness accounts that emulates journalism -- Edward Grim's account of the murder of Thomas A'Beckett in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 (Grim in Carey, 1987: 30-5) is one famous piece of such reportage -- most of it is heavily laced with religious homilies and doctrine. Similarly, travellers' tales were a popular form of reportage in medieval times but many, such as Mandeville's Travels and The Travels of Marco Polo, reverted to the kind of fable and mythology of Herodotus. It is not until the revival of Greek thought and culture in the Renaissance that there is a similar revival of the ideal of dispassionate, eyewitness accounts that try to let the events speak for themselves. Some of the best examples of these come from sixteenth century Portuguese, Spanish and Italian accounts of exploration in the New World of the Americas. (Vespucci, Las Casas, de Acosta, de la Vega and Schnirdel, all in Carey, 1987) Those who funded these voyages were interested in the economic opportunities opened up by the discoveries, in the religion and culture of the native inhabitants, and in the prospects for territorial annexation, and so wanted accurate information rather than stories to entertain. In other words, the Renaissance not only revived Greek art, drama, philosophy and literature but its idea of journalism as well.

As I noted above, when we are discussing the history of journalism we should distinguish it from the history of newspapers. The latter also have ancient origins. We know, for instance, that in ancient Rome there was a publication called Acta Diurna ('Daily Events'), a daily gazette dating from 59 BC and attributed in origin to Julius Caesar. (Schramm, 1988: 118, 150) Handwritten copies of this journal were posted in prominent places in Rome and in the provinces with the clear intention of disseminating official information. The typical Acta Diurna contained proclamations, edicts and decisions of the Roman Senate, military news and plebiscite results plus news of gladiatorial contests, astrological omens, notable marriages, births and deaths, public appointments, and trials and executions. There should be no great surprise about its appearance at this time. Imperial Rome was a city of more than one million people, with all the economic and political development that implied -- internal and international trade, a division of labour, political representatives and institutions -- and some form of regular communication between authority and the populace was a natural development.

Its later counterpart in medieval Europe was the newssheet, which was also handwritten by official scribes and read aloud by town criers. News was also contained in the medieval newsbook, or news pamphlet, which flourished as a means of disseminating information on particular topics of interest. By the end of the fifteenth century, publication of newsbooks was running at more than twenty a year in England alone, matching a regular supply on the Continent. (Smith, 1978: Chapter One; Schram, 1988: 150-1)

Now, what is the point of tracing the origins of journalism and newspapers back beyond the modern period to the ancient and medieval worlds? When I raised this point with John Hartley at the "Media Wars" seminar at the Queensland University of Technology in November 1998 as a correction to his thesis about journalism and modernity, he simply replied: 'Thank you for the history lesson'. In other words, some people might find this stuff interesting, but it is of no consequence. Well, let me offer three reasons why it is actually very important for journalism education.

The first is the one I've already discussed. Journalism is a product of Western culture, it represents a radical break with the cultural assumptions held by earlier stages of human development, and it is arguably one of the reasons why Western society has been as dynamic and innovative as it has been. In saying this, I should emphasise, I'm not trying to be ethnocentric or racially chauvinist. Journalism was founded within Western culture but is by no means limited to Western culture. Its methods can be, and obviously have been, adopted by the people of any culture. And as we are currently witnessing in Indonesia, East Timor and Malaysia, journalism can be a powerful weapon in defence of the human rights of the people of any cultural background.

The second reason why the history of journalism matters is its implications for the positioning of journalism education within the university. If you regard journalism as a contemporary phenomenon and don't treat it historically, you end up with the situation we have now, where journalism is seen simply as one of the modern communication industries. Hence, it gets placed in many academic departments of communication where it sits alongside other bits and pieces of the communication industries such as advertising, public relations, multi-media, and so on. In this situation, journalism is just another media practice subject, like web page design. The teaching resources it attracts are commensurate with its ability to compete with these other areas of media production.

However, if you accept the historical approach I'm arguing here, then you place journalism within the traditional liberal arts and humanities. Moreover, journalism is not simply some kind of second-rate adjunct to traditional liberal arts like history, literature, philosophy, classics and politics; it is one of the traditional liberal arts. It deserves its own distinct academic departments with all the resources and paraphernalia that goes with that status. Moreover, given the current decline in student demand for some of the older humanities subjects, especially history and the classics, now would be a good time to argue for this position. (Mind you, I don't necessarily think the present trends will continue forever. History and the classics will eventually revive.)

Anyway, if journalism were placed as an equal partner with other liberal arts, then the components of a journalism degree would also change. The subjects that accompanied journalism to make up a whole Bachelor of Arts degree would no longer be the cultural studies version of media theory where the current crew have a monopoly now and for the foreseeable future. Instead, a student would major in journalism alongside majors in history, or English literature, or politics, or philosophy, or perhaps economics. Within the journalism major, you would still need some media theory as a reflection on current professional practice. Here you would still need the kind of academic studies by former media practitioners that are contained in Myles Breen's new book, Journalism: Theory and Practice. But the emphasis in the rest of the journalism major would shift away from studies of the contemporary media industry, towards a more traditional scholarly curriculum.

If you make a comparison with, say, history, you find that a good liberal arts major or honours course teaches three things: 1. the latest research findings by historians working in the field; 2. the methodology of history research and writing, that is, how to do it; and 3. the works of the great historians, that is, the canon of historiography. In journalism education, however, there is an obvious dearth of the third of these. There are canons of great books in history, literature, philosophy and politics, but not in journalism. The nearest we have is the anthology edited by John Carey, The Faber Book of Reportage, which not only contains the excerpts from Thucydides and Tacitus I gave earlier, but is the best demonstration I know of both the depth and quality of the whole of the Western journalistic tradition.

This leads to the third reason why the historical paradigm I'm advocating is important for journalism education -- the issue of research into journalism. From what I can gather about the MA and PhD research theses done within Australian academic departments of journalism, the great majority are on some aspect of media sociology, or of contemporary journalism practice, or on aspects of journalism education itself. There is not a great deal of the kind of research that would be produced if you regarded journalism as one of the liberal arts, that is, on the history of journalism, on journalism as literature, or on the politics of journalism. Let me give some examples of what I mean.

1. The history of journalistic genres

The best demonstration I know of how to write a study of a journalistic genre is Philip Knightley's book The First Casualty, which is a history of war reporting from the Crimea to Vietnam. Apart from dealing with all the very difficult logistical and political problems involved in writing about warfare, Knightley identifies two distinct branches within the genre. One of these is the reporting of battles, strategies and the course of warfare, that is, who is winning, who is losing and why. In general, he argues, this kind of writing has emphasised the triumphs and the glories of war and is, at the same time, the most susceptible to manipulation by politicians, generals and military public relations departments. The other style within the genre is what might be called the face of battle, or the direct experience of warfare by the individual soldier: what it feels like to be shot at, to try to kill others, to see your comrades die in action, to witness a battlefield full of the dead. In general, this kind of reportage is tragic. It invokes pity for the human condition and generates distaste for war among both writer and reader. In other words, Knightley's history of war reporting is not only a valuable addition to the literature itself but has profound lessons for journalistic practice.

Not all studies of journalistic genres need be as long as Knightley's, which covers more than one hundred years. Another very good example is Tom Wolfe's book The New Journalism, which traced the rise of attempts in the 1960s to import the writing styles of fiction into works of non-fiction. Again, this book not only established the integrity of these techniques but also produced some great lessons in how to do it.

Both The First Casualty and The New Journalism were written by people who were at the time working journalists. However, this kind of work is ideally done by journalism academics. It involves the kind of reflective, over-arching scholarship that universities once prided themselves on performing and on which the reputation of university research was once founded. If a canon of great journalism is to be, first, identified and, second, published, the study of genres of this kind would seem to be one of the most fruitful ways of accomplishing this.

2. Journalism and literature

Some of the greatest writers of the last several centuries have combined careers in both journalism and literature: Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell. In some of these authors, like Dickens, the balance of their output was more towards fiction but in others, like Orwell, it was more to non-fiction. There is obviously a great deal of literary criticism available about the fiction of these writers but surprisingly little analysis of the prose style and the research techniques they adopted for their non-fiction. The production of analyses of the latter kind would be important to elevate the status of journalism, to establish its position as literature in its own right, and to provide role models for young people who want to eventually write both journalism and literature of their own.

One of the most common ways of approaching this field is through a literary biography. One very good example is Tom Pocock's biography of Alan Moorehead, the great Australian World War Two correspondent and the author of some of the best non-fiction work of the 1950s and 1960s. Another recent model is Michael Robertson's book Stephen Crane, Journalism and the Making of Modern American Literature. Robertson makes the point that, in Crane's case, his background in journalism extended his experience well beyond the social class into which he had been born and allowed him to directly explore a much wider range of human experience than would otherwise have been possible. Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage, is also a good example of a writer who could bridge the distinction between high and low culture, again thanks to his experience as a newspaper reporter. Robertson writes:

He used the common form of the journalistic experiment to convey the realities of urban poverty to his readers and to conduct profound naturalistic investigations into the social construction of human identity. He wrote travel journalism that moves far beyond the touristic to consider subtleties of perception, economic and political oppression, and humanity's struggle against nature … He wrote dazzling war correspondence that conveys the complexity, confusion, and inconsequentiality of battle. Crane also took advantage of his role as reporter for mass-circulating newspapers to gather experiences that might otherwise have been inaccessible to the son of a Methodist minister. (Robertson, 1997: 179)

There are a considerable number of Australian journalists, both dead and alive, who have produced a body of work substantial enough to justify a biography and the kind of literary analysis I'm advocating here. There is no reason, of course, why an Australian journalism PhD has to be on an Australian topic and the other foreign literary figures I mentioned above would prove equally as fruitful.

3. The politics of journalism

By this I don't mean the currently prevailing views of those cultural studies theorists who dutifully repeat Michel Foucault's claim that the production of knowledge always involves the production of power. Rather, I mean the locating of a journalism research topic within the traditional discipline of political science. Rod Tiffen's book News and Power is a good Australian example of a contemporary study of this kind, but you can also pose some very interesting historical questions. For instance, what is the overall connection between journalism and democracy? Given that the journalism of Thucydides originated within the democratic and egalitarian society of ancient Athens, and that the profession flourishes most within contemporary liberal democratic societies, are there long-term generalisations one can draw from the connection between the two? Similar questions could be posed by the relationship between, say, newspapers and tyrannies. On my cursory reading of the subject, it seems the greater the tyranny the fewer the number of publications. Few tyrants in history have abolished newspapers altogether. Most, like Julius Caesar or Joseph Stalin, permitted at least one to be published. However, in times of political disorder, revolution and great social change, the number of newspapers almost invariably proliferates. In the twenty years from the start of the English Civil War in 1640 and the Restoration, some thirty thousand news publicatons and pamphlets appeared in London, either covering the course of the war or the political and religious upheavals that accompanied it. In revolutionary France in 1789 there was a proliferation of hundreds of newspapers. (Smith, 1979: 34, 89; Hirst, 1986: 194)

The politics of journalism also includes the business of reporting about politics, and there are some great models here as well. They include Woodward and Bernstein's manual on how to get an American President impeached, All the President's Men. (As I was writing this, it was uncertain whether President Bill Clinton would be subject to an impeachment process. Of course, the big difference between the Clinton and Nixon impeachments is that, this time, we know who Deep Throat really is.)

There are also several other books from the 1970s that describe the research techniques used during the great wave of investigative journalism that characterised that decade. (Downie, 1976; Scanlon, 1977) If you want to revive investigative journalism, you need new manuals like this on how the best reporters have done it, and this could prove an ideal area for academic research.

Let me finish by saying that the proper identification of journalism educators should be with the profession of journalism and the traditions it represents. Their role should be to criticise bad practises and to honour the best. The main problem at present lies in knowing what actually constitutes the best. We don't know enough about the history of journalism, we haven't identified enough of the great figures within the journalistic tradition, we have neither a proper classification nor an analysis of the various genres that constitute journalism. Lacking these, it is difficult to teach the subject as well as we could. So it is that much harder to inspire students to reach its heights, or to appreciate its full cultural status and integrity. But if journalism education was re-positioned within the academy, if its natural peers were seen to be the traditional liberal arts of history, literature, philosophy, politics and classics, if it adopted their academic objectives and modes of scholarship, all these things would come much closer within reach.

References:

Aristotle, Poetics, 9, trans. S. H. Butcher, (1992) Reader's Library, Micro-Mart Computer CD-ROM

Breen, Myles, (ed.) (1998) Journalism: Theory and Practice, Macleay Press, Sydney

Carey, John (ed.) (1987) The Faber Book of Reportage, Faber and Faber, London

de Acosta, José, 'Human Sacrifice among the Aztecs, c. 1520' in John Carey (ed.) (1987) The Faber Book of Reportage, Faber and Faber, London, 1987

de la Vega, Garcilaso , 'The Incas' Golden Garden, c. 1530' in John Carey (ed.) (1987) The Faber Book of Reportage, Faber and Faber, London, 1987

Downie, Leonard Jr (1976) The New Muckrakers, New American Library, New York

Finley, M. I. 'Introduction' to Thucydides (1972), History of the Peloponnesian War, Penguin Classics edn, Penguin Books, London

Grim, Edward, from W. H. Hutton (ed.) St Thomas of Canterbury 1118-1220, London, 1889,reproduced in John Carey (ed.) (1987) The Faber Book of Reportage, Faber and Faber, London

Hartley, John (1996) 'Journalism and Modernity', Australian Journal of Communication, Vol. 22 (2), 1995, extracted from Hartley's Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture, Edward Arnold, London

Knightley, Philip (1978) The First Casualty: From Crimea to Vietnam: The war correspondent as hero, propagandist and myth maker, Quartet, London

Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 'Spanish Atrocities in the West Indies c. 1513-20' 1502' in John Carey (ed.) (1987) The Faber Book of Reportage, Faber and Faber, London, 1987

"Media Wars: Media Studies and Journalism Education" Seminar, organised by Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy, Faculty of Arts, Griffith University, and Queensland University of Technology, 27 November 1998

Pocock, Tom (1990), Alan Moorehead, The Bodley Head, London

Robertson, Michael (1998) Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature, Columbia University Press, New York

Scanlon, Paul (ed.) (1977) Reporting: The Rolling Stone Style, Anchor Press/Doubleday, New York

Schnirdel, Hulderike, 'With the Spaniards in Paraguay, 1537-40'; in John Carey (ed.) (1987) The Faber Book of Reportage, Faber and Faber, London

Schramm, Wilbur (1988) The Story of Human Communication: Cave Painting to Microchip, Harper and Row, New York

Smith, Anthony (1979) The Newspaper: An International History, Thames and Hudson, London 1979

Tacitus (1956), The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant, Penguin Classics edn., Harmondsworth

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