Bird Elizabeth, Facing the Distracted Audience, Journalism and Cultural Context

7/28/2019 Bird Elizabeth, Facing the Distracted Audience, Journalism and Cultural Context

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Facing the distracted audience: journalism and cultural context

S. Elizabeth Bird

University of South Florida

Not long ago, I participated in an international colloquium on the phenom-

enon of tabloidization. As the event began, many of us thought we under-

stood the meaning of the term we were gathered to discuss. Most of us from

Britain and the United States held some kind of notion that tabloidization

was a negative process that was dumbing down journalism and discouraging

rational discourse. Indeed, I still think this is happening in those two nations,

as well as in some other European countries. However, we also learned that in

some contexts, such as Mexico and the former Eastern bloc, apparently similar

trends in journalism a loosening of controls, snappier, more accessible

writing, concern to engage the reader were acting as positive forces for social

change and democratic participation. By the end of three days, the meaning

and the implications of tabloidization were no longer so clear.

The lesson, of course, is that to understand journalism we have to

understand cultural context. Journalism emerges from and responds to cul-

tural specificities. Even in two societies as apparently similar as Britain and the

United States, we dont always acknowledge or understand this. For instance,

when people (often reporters) ask me to comment about one of my researchinterests weekly US supermarket tabloids they often take it for granted that

these papers are the same as British dailies. In fact, apart from similar layouts,

writing styles, and an interest in celebrities, there are many ways in which they

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are different, and these reflect quite distinct cultural milieus. British tabloids

are explicit, visually and verbally, about sex, while American weeklies avoid

direct references, one of the reasons they were left behind by respectable

papers in coverage of the ClintonLewinsky scandal. American weeklies are far

more interested in paranormal topics and religious themes, such as biblical

prophecies and faith healing. British tabloids reflect a much greater sense of

working-class consciousness than those in the United States, where everyone

is middle class.

My point here is not to elaborate on tabloids as such, but rather to argue

that we need to be more aware that journalism isnt some kind of universal

phenomenon, a taken-for-granted reality that transcends national and cultural

boundaries. Issues that are important to journalism in one context may beirrelevant in another. My hope is that this new journal will provide a forum for

work that goes beyond narrow analyses of particular collections of texts, or

particular local issues, and moves to contextualize journalistic trends and

issues and explore them culturally.

Here, I would like to explore an issue I believe faces journalism in the

United States, trying to see how it is located in American cultural specifics,

which are not necessarily the same as those in other contexts. One of the

challenges we are already facing here is how to understand the audience for

news, and how to assess the implication for journalists of what we are seeing

as an increasingly distracted audience. We know that journalists have always

had to work to catch and hold the attention of their audiences. The inverted

pyramid structure evolved as a way to present the main points of the story as

quickly as possible, allowing readers to choose whether they stayed with the

story or moved onto something more engaging. Yet for much of this century,

newspaper journalists, and then network news reporters, were able to assume

that there was a sizeable audience out there, who could be counted on at least

to pick up the paper or flip on the TV every evening. The journalists role as

broker and shaper of information was understood, and the choices for the

reader or viewer were fairly few. At the beginning of a new century, there are

no such certainties.

We know, for example, that American newspaper readership is dropping,

and audiences for network and cable TV news are declining steadily. Whats

more, while adults over 50 are still relatively regular news consumers, those

under 30 are the least likely to be interested in news, especially from tradi-

tional sources. What we really dont know is what this means, and what itsimplications for journalism may be. Is this trend merely part of the normal life

cycle? In 20 years, will todays 25-year-olds have become faithful newspaper

readers? Or does it reflect a more profound cultural change?

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understand the future of journalism, we must try to understand the cultural

context in which news is received. We need to know more about how people

use and evaluate the internet, with its endless stream of unfiltered informa-

tion. The internets informational style does mesh perfectly with the distracted

style of an audience that places entertainment above all else. Does its flow also

feed into an apparent growth in relativistic attitudes among young people,

encouraging a sense that all news is equally credible or incredible? Indeed,

news no longer has the kind of privileged status it once did among other

sources of information. In Britain, Independent Television recently did what

seemed unthinkable, bumping its nightly News at Ten broadcast out of its

sacred time slot because its ratings no longer justified that key position.

American anchor Walter Cronkites famous signature, and thats the way it is,would be laughed off the screen today, or would be assumed to be said in

knowing irony. Our audiences, whether they are our students or our readers,

are distracted in a way that surely is new, and we need more than anecdotes to

understand this. If this is the news audience of the future, where exactly does

it leave journalism?

One of the hallmarks of the second half of the 20th century was the

journalistic moment as cultural unifier news footage of Iwo Jima, the

Kennedy funeral, the Apollo moon landing, Martin Luther Kings I have a

dream speech, are used in multiple contexts to evoke a shared culturalmemory. As the culture fragments into special interest groups who gather their

information from multiple sources and in private ways, sometimes there seems

to be a note of desperation in the journalism professions attempts to recapture

the notion of a shared news in which we can assume everyone is interested. If

we were reading American newspapers and watching TV news in October

1998, we might be forgiven for assuming that the whole nation was enthralled

by the saga of former Apollo astronaut John Glenns return to space, as a now-

routine space shuttle flight was transformed into the stuff of legend. Yet its

likely that many, if not most Americans were not watching or reading, and

were not participating in any great national celebration. Reporters created an

even greater mythical event around the 1999 death of John F. Kennedy Jr,

covering it relentlessly, and declaring it a national tragedy, even as many of

the younger people-in-the-street they were interviewing described them-

selves as essentially indifferent to the Kennedys.

Of course, a less alarming way to look at this changing culture would be to

follow Rushcoffs (1996) argument that what we are seeing is the end of a

stifling monopoly on news and information. Once everyone had to believeCronkite, but now they can make their own decisions, using their own

multiple sources, and the days of the journalist as gate-keeper and agenda-

setter are numbered. Maybe the new electronic information tide is liberating,

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and analogous to the freeing of the press after the fall of the Eastern bloc, or

the revolution in American journalism brought about by the penny press.

From this perspective, journalists must abandon any delusions of special

status, and learn how to compete among the array of informational sources;

they may not be able to reach everyone, but will connect with those who care.

And in 20 years, maybe todays teenagers wont be reading newspapers, but

will access their electronic versions as they participate in a new democracy.

All this is to say that there are myriad questions, and very few answers,

facing journalism and its relationship with its audiences. The questions I have

raised here are some of those that seem important in the United States,

although many are completely irrelevant in other contexts. Here, we tend to

forget that while we worry about the effects of addiction to computers,millions of people world-wide cannot even communicate by telephone. In a

country where we agonize about political apathy, low voter turn-out, and the

role of journalists in changing this, we forget about nations where people put

themselves at risk for the right to vote or to read uncensored news. There is a

world of difference between a news audience which is thirsty for information,

and one which is saturated with it. Journalism has multiple meanings in many

contexts, and I hope this new journal will help us consider some of those

meanings in action.

References

Bird, S. Elizabeth (2000) Audience Demands in a Murderous Market: Tabloidization in

U.S. Television News, in Colin Sparks and John Tulloch (eds) Tabloid Tales. New

York: Rowan and Littlefield.

Rushcoff, Douglas (1996) Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. New York:

Ballantine Books.

Whillock, Rita K. (1999) Giant Sucking Sounds: Politics as Illusion, in David Slayden

and Rita K. Whillock (eds) Soundbite Culture: The Death of Discourse in a Wired

World, pp. 528. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Journalism studies in an era of transition in public

communications

Jean K. Chalaby

City University, London

There is mounting evidence that public communications is entering a phase of

transition.1 Factors of change include the information technology revolution;

the emergence of new media; the rise of cyberspace; the convergence between

What is journalism studies? 33

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Bird Elizabeth, Facing the Distracted Audience, Journalism and Cultural Context