Some food for thought on Pomo Oz
As promised, I thought I would blog some of my initial thoughts on Pomo Oz. I’m hoping that we can continue a fruitful debate in class on Monday!This is quite a new reading (The book was published in 2010) and I have not set it before. So my thoughts on this chapter are as new as yours will be! My initial thinking is that despite Lucy’s playful use of language, he actually has a quite serious point to make about journalistic practice.
The first chapter of his book concentrates on the language of narrative representation–the language of reportage. Lucy makes the point that journalism is not considered ‘writing’, and he is correct; journalism is the kind of po-faced cousin of poetry and literature. Those bohemians get to have all the fun. Indeed journalists themselves eschew the label of ‘writer’. Yet most journalism students, when asked why they want to be a journalist, say “well, i love to write…”
So what’s going on here and how do we relate it to what Lucy is saying in his chapter?
I focused on Lucy’s sense of journalistic writing as ‘a contextual trace of something that just indubitably ‘is’ outside of language’. Though he doesn’t say it overtly, journalistic writing’s big cultural claim is to ‘truth’. That’s why he suggests that reading an old newspaper is like communing with the dead–it is the use of language that represents solid, inalienable ‘truth’. Publication of journalism makes an event singular–there is only one perspective, one description of a singular truth.
Journalists don’t wish to be considered ‘writers’ because they consider themselves to be dealing with truth. They don’t consider their writing narrative; but ‘reporting’. There is no sense of the abstract, or of fragmentation in journalistic writing.
The cultural power associated with finding the ‘truth’ has been an important aspect of journalism’s social authority. They have the power to describe reality on behalf of the public they serve But this has traditionally been a one-way conversation. Online environments have had a democratising influence on this sense of authority–news is now a two way conversation between producers and their audiences.
But not all journalists are pleased about this–they see their practice as a profession, not to be diluted by the likes of citizen or amateur reporters. To protect their cultural authority, journalists and institutionalized, traditional media continually perpetuate the myth that only they have the training and specialized knowledge to publish ‘real journalism’.
I think this might be the basis of what Lucy calls the ‘journalistic reality effect’. The strategically choose and write “what ‘was’ or still ‘is’”. Simply by choosing the intention of their language, journalists are strategically arguing for a particular description of reality, and their place within it. Journalists “point their keyboard” at the world because the language that they choose takes away misinterpretation and cements their authority as a representative narrator of the world.
This is a strategic and political move from journalists and the opinion of the journalist as ‘truth’ has become quite an industry. I do think we need to be careful of the particular types of journalists we are speaking about. Opinion is not necessarily journalism, just as street art is not necessarily literature. Lucy also makes this point.
So perhaps I might leave it there–I wouldn’t mind taking up the idea of journalism as photograph in the next class. Hope to see you there for alively discussion!