Closing of the Journalism Mind

Chapter 8 measures anti-intellectualism among mass communication students for the first time and finds that support for journalistic anti-intellectualism is condoned in the views of emerging adults as they develop attitudes toward news, audiences, and authority. Data are drawn from questionnaires distributed to undergraduates at five colleges. Majoring in the news and support for traditional press roles such as the interpretive function fail to inoculate students against the endorsement of journalistic anti-rationalism and anti-elitism. While reflexivity is often viewed as conducive to critical thinking, students’ affinity for transparency in newswork associates with suspicion of intellectuals and their ideas. Many students are drawn to journalism as practice and as a field of study because of its populist mythos. Educators should emphasize a critical autonomy that makes room for transparency but does not succumb to climates of opinion.

Social Drama at Macro and Micro Levels

Chapter 6 applies social drama—adapted from the anthropology of Victor Turner—to portray media ritual in punishment of an intellectual breach. The transgression occurred when Ward Churchill, a University of Colorado scholar of ethnic studies, hammered out an essay in response to the suicidal/homicidal attacks of September 11, 2001. Churchill plowed through consequences of US involvement in various regions of the globe, dismissing with contempt the notion that Americans could have been surprised by payback. Analysis of the media frenzy uncovers a fractal-like structure, such that ritualistic punishment as a cultural response is anticipated in the first wave of news text. Exposure of the macro-micro constitution, in turn, leads to a discussion as to whether journalism’s performance is best understood as culturally conscripted or opportunistic. The former is the more benign interpretation. In the latter scenario, a predatory press elevates its cultural status at intellect’s expense.

The Academic-Media Nexus

The academic-media nexus represents a liminal space where intellectual work is regularly held up to public judgment. Three sources of control impinge on the nexus as a sphere for ideas that challenge orthodoxies: self-imposed instrumentalism of intellectuals; a new form of anti-intellectualism that features systemic surveillance of academic discourse; and the strategic communication of university administrations. The contemporary university is instrumental and strategic rather than anti-rationalist in the control of intellect. Still, mistrust of intellect thrives at private and public colleges, entrusted with preservation of cultural heritage. When faculty take risks in the public sphere, they should not assume that administrators will support them against populist blowback. A final section contemplates implications of risk-averse tactics for public perceptions of intellect and its contributions to political discourse and policy.

What Intellectual Journalism Would Look Like

The book concludes with a discussion of how intellectual journalism would forge a healthier relationship with the public by overcoming recursion. The uptake of authoritarian thinking is not easily reversed in political communication as a self-reinforcing system. For realists, truth is obtained in a correspondence between statements and facts. In recursion, truth is experienced as reassurance in a compressed universe of legitimate and legitimating discourse. Earlier chapters examined aftershocks of the 2016 election, professional education, and other contexts that might engender a rethinking of media engagement with intellect. Drawing on these insights, the final chapter suggests where to look for intellectual journalism as an emerging ethos. Intellectual journalism asserts itself in a shift from public-oriented to craft-oriented accountability; the wisdom to reject misguided reform; alliances with risk-tolerant scholars; and forms of resistance that reject the bad faith of insincere objectivity.

Peopling of the Journalistic Imagination

Chapter 2 posits that journalism invests in democratic decline through representation of grievance, benefiting in fact, from anti-elitist insurgence at the expense of other institutions. Political scientists refer to democratic backsliding as decline in support for norms that foster consent of the governed. The channeling of anger cripples the capacity of news media to work effectively with policymakers in setting an agenda supportive of those left behind by neoliberalism. The result is a failure of responsiveness in both journalism and governance. A brief history of professional education foreshadows how the press would accommodate the rise of Donald Trump. A discussion of how anti-intellectualism manifests in American culture then underscores how the failure of journalism to develop as an intellectual profession makes it vulnerable to incursion of illiberal sentiment. Populist anti-elitism, anti-rationalism, and other strands of anti-intellectualism intertwine in the news, churning up contradictions of democracy, inviting further decline.

Eclipse of Reflexivity in the Rise of Trump

A climate of punitive populism during election campaigns constitutes both a threat to journalism’s authority and an opportunity to command attention in ways reminiscent of the pre-digital era. Chapter 3 considers whether the press has internalized a proto-democratic duty to represent public mood by redeeming the same irrationalism that it helps to mobilize. Affirmation of anger in conjunction with downplaying of policy expertise is antithetical to journalism’s understanding of its contribution to an informed electorate. This contradiction leads to an appraisal of how journalists critique their work. The chapter compares commentaries of media scholars to interpretations of reporters and columnists following the startling 2016 election. While journalists recognized audiences as intolerant of quality news, they appeared unable to contemplate how this critique shaped their reporting. Disproportionate attention to candidate Trump was not so much justified as large sectors of the electorate were imagined as intolerant of reason-based reporting.

Journalism and Intellect

Journalism’s resentment toward intellect is tangled up with the profession’s democratic commitments: its egalitarian ethos, identification with “the public,” ambivalence toward experts, and pleasure in holding up the haughty and highbrow to ridicule. Chapter 1 illustrates the vexed orientation of news media to intellect in templates such as the ridicule of aging Marxists and the willingness of reporters to humiliate themselves in sciencey-sounding stories. Some of these tropes could be viewed as harmless eccentricities of newswork, but the introduction reveals journalism’s complicity in reification and rationalization of a punitive public. A tactical relationship to intellect is in some respects innate to journalism. Communication is constitutive of community, which is bound by core beliefs, which are inevitably dissected by intellect. A reticence to engage with intellect can veer into bouts of overt hostility, a dynamic shaped by the obligation of mainstream media to defend moral foundations of sanctity, loyalty, and authority.

In My Buggy

Interviews of 25 scholars targeted by watchlists probe how public intellectuals invest in trusting relationships with reporters in ways that ensure the successful brokering of ideas. Chapter 9 documents practices of “dangerous professors” that allow them to navigate uncertainty and vigilante blowback. The academic-media nexus can seem like a kaleidoscopic space, where public scholars experience reversals of hierarchy and where rules of engagement are, at best, implicit and contingent. Over time, risk-tolerant and conflict-seeking activists should become sensitive to constraints of news production on the free play of intellect. One way or another, they must rework relationships with reporters to confront the news as a paradigm of conventional wisdom. For a reporter, striking gold in interviews sometimes requires the acknowledgment of a scholar’s critique of the news. The disorientation of a hybrid field is consequently generative of reflexivity in efforts to reconcile intellect with journalism.

Policing Intellectual Transgressions

Chapter 5 explicates how resentment and suspicion of intellect is condoned in the news. Feeling toward intellect is only consequential to the extent that it finds a voice, a rationale, and a medium for mobilization. Antipathy toward intellect embedded in the news explains how this sentiment is mobilized and aligned through the news in configurations such as moral panic, social drama, and reification of a punitive public. The news provides the grounding from which resentment and suspicion outside journalism gain traction in redress of ideational transgressions. A cyclical dynamic emerges in phases of latency and activation. The chapter proposes a recursive regime to account for journalism’s role in the activation of antipathy; alignment of anti-rationalism with populist anti-elitism in symbolic action; and return to equilibrium. Long after news media respond to an intellectual breach, residual resentment is left behind, awaiting reactivation when the climate is ripe.

Deviant in Residence

Journalism following 9/11 became fiercely protective of American innocence, and while the Colorado social drama demonstrates the prowess of proximate media in punishment of intellectual dissent, the case also offers an opportunity to observe resistance at the epicenter of redress. The drama illustrates idea rendering and repair as a dynamic in which news prompts a corrective response. Content analysis focuses on de-contextualization as the rendering practice in newspaper coverage. Idea repair is explored in how contributors to Front Range opinion pages bypassed news to engage directly with Churchill’s polemic. Journalists, for their part, are not simply enlisted in suppression of ideas. When confronted with evidence of de-contextualization, reporters and editors responded across a range of denial, ambivalence, regret, and resistance. A concluding section contemplates the role of parochial media in regulation of ideas across time and place.