The Task of Journalism in the Age of Terrorism

Abstract

Over the course of its American journalism has bound itself, consciously and unconsciously, to the complex narrative of American exceptionalism means of an embedded structural commitment to a dialectical unfolding America's presumed unique mission in the world. That narrative's ideological - the fulfillment of a metaphysical goal inherited from a traditional idea of the West - has had many discrete historical incarnations, among them: the erection of a shining city on a hill; an ever-expanding frontier secured manifest destiny; and most recently, the proclaimed victory over communism disclosing the so-called end of history, or global triumph of capitalist democracy. As this essay will argue, American journalism has embraced an idea of the sacred nearly from its inception.1 Such commitment to a providential understanding of progress might even be said to have installed our modern understanding of the concept of news: that which disturbs the status quo and potentially threatens the nation's idea, and image, of its role in the world. rise of the journalistic convention of objectivity that developed at the turn of the twentieth century has had the effect of masking the sacred, even as it remained embedded at the center of American journalism's secular mission. Events that have followed in the wake of the September 11, 2001 bombings in New York City and Washington, D.C. and the prospect of a never-ending on terror lend an urgency to the task of contemporary journalism as this essay will attempt to define it. By tracing some of that history through critical lens made available Giorgio Agamben's strategy of profanation, I hope offer a useful philosophical gloss for imagining profaned journalistic mission and practice, i.e., one unsutured from the exceptionalist and, thus, one that encourages a journalism that is freed from preconceived ends.2 Journalism in the Age of the World Picture It is instructive to constellate some of the earliest journalistic critics with the philosophers whose work explored the modern crisis of representation. Compare, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche's understanding of truth and lying (1873) with Walter Lippmann's sense of the in our heads in 1922: What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical, and binding: truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigor, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins. . . . Originally, as we have seen, it is language which works on building the edifice of concepts; later it is science. Walter Lippmann opened Public Opinion with a retelling of the allegory of the cave from Plato's Republic, and titled his introduction The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads. The analyst of public opinion must begin then, Lippmann suggests, by recognizing the triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself out upon the scene of action. As a practicing journalist who also logged service as a government official, Lippmann offers a rich perspective from which to consider the horizon of representation, witnessing its effects on public opinion as well as government practice. modern emergence of propaganda, public relations and press management all take place, not accidently, at the turn of the twentieth century, a historical moment parallel with the apex of the journalistic tradition of objectivity considered as the best means for expressing realism.5 One can easily understand how the concept of media framing arose from such early observations. …