This Week's Suggested Book from the Ashbrook Center (Monday, December 20, 1999)
 | | Taking Journalism Seriously: “Objectivity” as a Partisan Cause
by Richard H. Reeb, Jr. |
University Press of America, Inc. 326 pages, January 1999 Hardcover, 27.50 ISBN: 0761812768
A percentage of the proceeds from your purchase of this book from Amazon.com will benefit the Ashbrook Center.
Review of Taking Journalism Seriously
By Richard L. Williams
Glendale College, Professor of Government
Professor Richard Reebs work, Taking Journalism Seriously, offers its reader a great return on the time which one must invest in the serious study
which this critical and most unconventional or ground-breaking analysis of the American press or media demands. Reeb’s analysis of the journalistic
enterprise stems from the Founders (Jeffersons, Madisons and Hamiltons) premise that the media together constitute a political institution
which serves a necessary political function; and which must be judged according to the extent to which it either impedes or facilitates the public’s education in
what Jefferson called the true facts and sound principles of our form of government. Judged in this light, the core problem of our media is not—as
many have argued—their lack of what is called objectivity. Rather, as Reeb shows, their core problem is their partisanship in the service of unsound or
false political principles. In short, the media's core problem lies in the belief that through schooling the public in their transcendent discoveries: to wit,
that one can properly study politics only by studying it scientifically and that one can truly understand political speech only by understanding it
historically; journalism will be able to lead all of us out of the cave of the harsh realities of the contentions between passionate and interested
political partisans, and into the sunlight of a world from which those journalistic solvents have removed all partisan contentions, conflicts,
struggles and wars.
As Reeb shows through his careful study of Walter Lippman, the journalistic estrangement from final causation, that is, from
the purposes, ends, aims or objectives of political life, necessarily falsifies political phenomena. After all, in politics more comprehensively
than in anything else, every art and every activity aims at the attainment of some good, and categorically to deny the existence of that aiming
point—as objective journalism does—is necessarily to distort the political phenomena being covered. Similarly, Reeb shows that journalistic
historicism, (or the dogmatic assumption that all expressions of values are and can be nothing more than the reflections of the interests, times and
places out of which they arose), necessarily distorts the political phenomena; leading as well to such a condescending journalistic
neutrality or indifference to fundamental political quarrels that the grounds of the freedom of both the journalist and the citizen become
obscured. Finally, and as is appropriate to a work which aims at the reconstitution of our media, Taking Journalism Seriously returns us to our
Founders and to their most instructive efforts to constitute a fourth estate which is devotion to its proper work of
reporting the true facts and more so articulating the sound principles of the public’s business.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Preface
- Part I: The Selling of the Pentagon
- 1. How CBS Edits Interviews and Speeches
- 2. How CBS Defends its Editing Practicies
- 3. CBS Makes its Case Against Propaganda
- 4. The Critics Make Their Case Against CBS
- Part II: The Pentagon Papers
- 5. How the Times Reports Secrets
- 6. Why the Times Failed in its Criticism
- 7. Objective Journalism as Authority
- 8. The right to Know or Media Discretion
- Part III: Roots of the Current Problem
- 9. Walter Lippmann and Citizenship
- 10. The Limits of History and Science
- 11. James Reston: A Reporter in Politics
- Part IV: The Journalism of the Founders
- 12. Thomas Jefferson: Politics of Journalism
- 13. James Madison: Teacher and Exemplar
- 14. Alexander Hamilton Completes the Work
- Afterword
- Index
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