 |
| Controversy: Don Imus was fired in April for racist and sexist remarks. Richard Drew/AP/file |
Crass public discourse: Time to push back?
The expected return of Don Imus to the airwaves comes as some see a desire for moderation.
from the October 22, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 2
Page 1 | 2
"There's no doubt that the line of what you can get away with in public discourse has moved," says Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Project on Excellence in Journalism. "It's moved not simply because there are a couple of personalities that have been willing to challenge it, but a lot because of how the media itself has changed."
The advent of 24–hour cable channel news first fueled the slide into incivility by blurring news and opinion and championing shout fests over reasoned debate, says Mr. Jurkowitz. Then the Internet blossomed into a kind of Wild West where anonymous insults are hurled with little if any regard for their impact. "The amount of unproven, accusatory invective which routinely gets disseminated [on the Internet] has definitely immunized us to what we listen to and hear in the public square," says Jurkowitz.
And with the proliferation of media, that public square just keeps getting bigger with more soap boxes. And that, he and other media experts say, fuels the increasing harshness.
"The impetus for everyone, whether it be TV programmers or advertisers, is that you have to make a lot of more noise to get people's attention," says Ken Auletta, media critic of The New Yorker. "And part of having more noise is having more controversy."
What often gets lost in this shout environment is the media's traditional role as an arbiter or moderator in the public square. "What we have now is this crazy formula that says, 'On the one hand, on the other hand': Too often the press plays it as a ping-pong match," says Mr. Auletta. "Part of our job is to adjudicate the truth, too."
In this highly polarized political environment, where both the right and left are quick to attack journalists that attempt to adjudicate the truth, many news organizations have begun to shy away from such a role, he says. But reviving it, Auletta says, could be an important solution to the disintegrating nature of public discourse: "There's no substitute for good, tough-minded journalism," he says.
[Editor's note: The original version of the subhead implied that Imus's return had been finalized, when actually the details were still being worked out.]
1 | Page 2
RSS feed
