2024年5月11日发(作者：pdf如何免费转换成word格式)

Journalism: A Definition

Brian McNair

What is journalism and, of equal relevance in this ambivalent post-modern

world, what is not? When the dividing lines in contemporary culture between

education, information and entertainment, between art and trash, between high

and low, elite and mass, are not always clear, and usually contested, where is the

line to be drawn between journalism and not-journalism, and does it matter?

It does matter, because the sociological significance of journalistic

communication arises largely from the audience’s expectations of a distinctive

form and content and from their agreement that when these distinguishing

characteristic are present the resulting communication enjoys a special status over

others which are not journalistic. Journalism is in this sense a privileged cultural

form and has been ever since the social upheavals of early modern Europe in

which it first found a central place in public discourse. Its privileges are the reward

for adherence to quite specific stylistic and narrative conventions, which I describe

below.

Defining journalism is made more difficult by the tendency of many

twentieth-century journalists deliberately to subvert the conventions of their

chosen form, setting out to introduce into it qualities more commonly associated

with art. The novelistic ‘new journalism’ of post-war America, exemplified by

the work of Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and others, or the cinematic scale of a

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documentary such as When We Were Kings ( Leon Gast, 1996) indicates the

difficulty of setting up too-rigid categories which preclude the possibility of a

journalist also being an artist, a scientist or even a sociologist. I will try here,

nonetheless, to define journalism as: any authored text, in written, audio or visual

form, which claims to be (i.e. is presented to its audience as) a truthful statement

about, or record of , some hitherto unknown (new) feature of the actual, social

world.

This definition and the elements I have emphasized, allow us to distinguish

journalism from other forms of cultural discourse which may be similar in some

respects.

Truth

First, journalism lays claim to the qualities of truthfulness and

accuracy—properties often implied by the term objectivity, a concept used to

legitimize the journalistic text while at the same time recognizing the

multidimensional and elusive nature of ‘truth’. Journalism asks to be accepted

as, at the very least, an approximation to truth, and certainly close enough to the

truth to be worthy of our trust in its integrity.

Newness

The journalistic statement also has to be new, if not in the facts presented then

in the interpretation of (or ‘spin’ put on) those facts. Journalism tells us things

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