Assessing Evidence in a Postmodern World [1 ed.] 9780874620375, 9780874620368

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Assessing Evidence in a Postmodern World

Assessing Evidence in a Postmodern World Edited by

Bonnie Brennen

diederich studies in media and communication No. 3 Bonnie Brennen, Series editor

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Assessing evidence in a postmodern world / edited by Bonnie Brennen.        pages cm. —  (Diederich studies in media and communication ; no. 3)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN-13: 978-0-87462-036-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)   ISBN-10: 0-87462-036-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1.  Journalism—Objectivity—United States. 2.   Truth. 3.    Mass media— Objectivity—United States.  I. Brennen, Bonnie. PN4888.O25A87 2013 071.3—dc23 2013006397

© 2013 Marquette University Press Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-3141 All rights reserved. www.marquette.edu/mupress/ Printed at Brandt Doubleday, Davenport, IA, USA The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Contents Introduction Bonnie Brennen ~ 7 Chapter 1 History, Journalism, and the Problem of Truth John Nerone ~ 11 Chapter 2 Why Journalism Has Always Pushed Perception Alongside Reality Barbie Zelizer ~ 31 Chapter 3 The Indecisive Moment: Snapshot Aesthetics as Journalistic Truth Andrew L. Mendelson ~ 41 Chapter 4 “It’s Just a Joke” Humor and Social Identity in Forwarded E-mail Images of Obama Margaret Duffy, Janis Page and Rachel Young ~ 67 Chapter 5 Mis/reading Obama:  Evidence, the Internet and the Battle Over Citizenship Tom Nakayama ~ 99 Chapter 6 Less Falseness as Antidote to the Anxieties of Postmodernism Linda Steiner ~ 113

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Chapter 7 Networked News Work Jane Singer ~ 137 Chapter 8 Does the Modern Trial Lack Credibility in a Postmodern World? Daniel Blinka ~ 151 Chapter 9 Promises and Challenges of Teaching Statistical Reasoning to Journalism Undergraduates: Twin Surveys of Department Heads, 1997 and 2008 Robert J. Griffin and Sharon Dunwoody ~ 169 Chapter 10 Media Insurgents in the Network Society: Breitbart, O’Keefe, and Mass Self-communication Frank Durham ~ 197 Chapter 11 Roundtable: Assessing Evidence in a Postmodern World ~ 217 About the Contributors ~ 239 Index ~ 245

Assessing Evidence in a Postmodern World Introduction

I

Bonnie Brennen

became interested in the changing notions of evidence when I was a doctoral student at the University of Iowa. Not surprisingly, popular culture was the contested domain. In June of 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle took on the television character Murphy Brown because in the situation comedy the character chose to have a child out of wedlock. Quayle insisted that as an intelligent, highly paid professional female, Murphy Brown’s decision to bear a child alone was a life-style choice that mocked the importance of fathers. At that time my thinking was safe within a cultural materialist framework that insisted on the existence of an external reality apart from individual human construction, and I remember wondering what was wrong with the Vice President that he could not distinguish a fictional character from a real person. Looking back, I see the Murphy Brown television episode as a linchpin in an escalating clash of cultures. Throughout the 1990s, popular culture offerings increasingly focused on issues of truth, justice, reality and special effects. Movies, music videos and television programs routinely challenged our concepts of perception and reality, yet the notion of a suspension of disbelief held fast and most people continued to believe in an external reality. However, during the last decade the distinctions between perception and reality have become increasingly blurred. Reality is now a fluid concept, and what people see as real is often defined by their ideological positions, their beliefs, their needs and/or their desires.

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Socially constructed reality has become individualized. Millions of people create their ideal image on Facebook and Second Life, friend is now a verb and to many individuals, face-to-face communication has become passé. Truthiness, Stephen Colbert’s notion that truth is what feels right rather than something based on logic, evidence or facts, appears to have overtaken more traditional forms of evidence. Within the media, the constant flow of information is often little more than rumor and innuendo. Media outlets routinely report on the perception of news rather than on authentic breaking news. For example, during week seven of the gulf oil spill, FOX news reported that the spill was not as bad as the media was making it out to be. The loss of tourism, canceled business and perceptions of tainted fish were, according to FOX news, overblown by news outlets which FOX directly attributed to an example of media bias. The nature of reality became a pivotal talking point during the recent 2012 Presidential election campaign. The Democratic and Republican candidates each charged that his opponent consistently misrepresented evidence, made things up and lied to the American public. Throughout the campaign, both candidates manipulated factual evidence to support their worldviews. When reporters and other fact-checkers sounded the alarm, and addressed the candidates’ use of deception and distortion, they were routinely dismissed by both campaigns as merely being partisan players. Reporters bemoaned the lack of consequences the candidates faced when they were caught in blatant lies. An October 2012 Time magazine cover story showcased ideologically constructed truths espoused by the Presidential candidates and suggested that the use of facts to deceive and distort illustrates our entrance into a post-truth era. In contemporary society, the nature of reality is continually challenged and each day there are new examples illustrating the notion that perception has become reality. The 2011 Nieman Conference “Assessing Evidence in a Postmodern World,” sponsored by the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University, was framed around my interest in how researchers might evaluate evidence when truth claims could no longer be made. The speakers discussed issues of perception, evidence, reality and postmodernism from a variety of different backgrounds including history, ethics, cultural studies, law and social science. This book project grows out of the Nieman conference and all of the chapters have been based on the original conference presentations.

Introduction

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Some of the chapters in this book project focus on theoretical and conceptual issues, while others discuss applied research related to the construction of evidence and issues of perception and reality. This collection begins with John Nerone’s chapter, “History, Journalism, and the Problem of Truth,” which provides us with 150 years of historical context related to efforts within history and journalism to tell true stories. Drawing on the notion of public intelligence as a regulative fiction, Nerone suggests that in recent years, where perception has become reality, that journalism and history have been unable to police the truth. In Chapter Two, Barbie Zelizer questions our understandings of evidence, our assumptions of assessment as well as our meanings of postmodernism. Drawing on an iconic image of the Iraq war, in “Why Journalism Has Always Pushed Perception Alongside Reality,” Zelizer suggests that journalists use elements of the past, the global and the simple to provide clarity, certainty, rationality and reason and to help them make sense of complex issues. Andrew L. Mendelson also draws on visual communication to consider contemporary changes in journalistic verification and authenticity. In his critical examination of camera phone photographs, “The Indecisive Moment: Snapshot Aesthetics as Journalistic Truth,” Mendelson suggests that the rise of snapshot imagery may limit the power of photojournalists to determine visual truth and control news narratives. Margaret Duffy, Janis Page and Rachel Young illustrate in Chapter Four how racially charged images and cartoons can be used to create a sense of community and social identity. In “‘It’s Just a Joke’: Humor and Social Identity in Forwarded E-mail Images of Obama,” Duffy, Page and Young find that forwarded e-mail images use stereotypes and humor to conceal racist stereotypes and to rationalize offensive behavior. Issues of race and national identity are the focus of Chapter Five, in which Tom Nakayama considers what constitutes evidence when proving citizenship. Drawing on research from the Birther and Tea Party movements, in “Mis/reading Obama: Evidence, the Internet and the Battle Over Citizenship,” Nakayama finds that far from living in a post-racial society, that in the U.S. today the concept of whiteness has become a contested site of struggle. Linda Steiner draws on Feminist Standpoint Epistemology (FSE) in “Less Falseness as Antidote to the Anxieties of Postmodernism,” to

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suggest a journalistic solution to the postmodern rejection of objectivity as well as to universal understandings of truth and evidence within positivism. For Steiner, FSE’s insistence on reflexivity, diversity and cultural identity, provides relevant, verified and complex accounts that have continued relevance to the field of journalism. In Chapter Seven, “Networked News Work,” Jane Singer discusses how journalists attempt to maintain control over the type of evidence that is shared with the public. Using the Prodigy coverage of the space shuttle Challenger explosion as an example, Singer addresses journalistic considerations of newsworthiness, news content and news discourse in the evaluation of evidence. Daniel Blinka considers the problem of evidence from a legal perspective in his chapter “Does the Modern Trial Lack Credibility in a Postmodern World?” Drawing on the symbiotic relationship between popular culture and rules of evidence, Blinka recommends that trial judges take an active role to assure the credibility of trials, providing juries with evidence that will help them to assess the accuracy of witnesses. In Chapter Nine, “Promises and Challenges of Teaching Statistical Reasoning to Undergraduates: Twin Surveys of Department Heads, 1997 and 2008,” Robert J. Griffin and Sharon Dunwoody examine the perceptions of journalism department heads regarding the teaching of statistical reasoning. Griffin and Dunwoody suggest that apart from ongoing challenges in teaching statistical reasoning that journalism programs can play a pivotal role in providing student journalists with important cognitive skills needed to assess and interpret relevant statistical information in contemporary society. Frank Durham draws on fabricated evidence of corruption used by right-wing media to discredit liberal organizations, in his chapter “Media Insurgents in the Network Society: Breitbart, O’Keefe and Mass Self-communication.” Durham notes that Breitbart and O’Keefe used the fluidity of new media to create an ideologically motivated campaign against traditional media. This collection ends with a transcript of a roundtable discussion with conference participants and audience members held during the 2011 Nieman Conference. The roundtable discussion highlights key issues and concerns that are also addressed by the authors in their chapters. For me, the discussion also encourages researchers to continue to contemplate the role of evidence in contemporary culture.

History, Journalism, and the Problem of Truth

J

John Nerone

ournalists and historians tell stories that aim to be true. That simple statement is vexed now and has been for some time, because of the failure of a previously confident notion of what it means for a story to be true. In this essay, I try to take a long view of developments in both professional journalism and professional history over the past century and a half, showing how moments of crisis appeared at roughly the same times in both fields. I suggest some reasons why this would have been so. Finally, I try to draw some conclusions about the durable aspects of the struggle to tell the truth, and the prospects for the same in the emerging digital media and communication environment.

I The generation that came of age in the 1970s in the developed world recognized a crisis in legitimation and cultural authority. This crisis was reflected in the professional discourses of history and journalism, two particularly good locations to look for such a crisis. They are good locations because they are relatively vernacular sites of knowledge production. The astrophysicists could have a crisis in the credibility of data-gathering processes, and it would mean nothing for the rest of us, at least until galaxies begin to collide. Nearby galaxies, I should say. If historians and journalists have trouble deciding among themselves how to claim to present the truth, then the greater society must also be having trouble. This is because both history and journalism are relatively undisciplined disciplines. Both are disciplines, in that both are constructed as mechanisms for policing a field of representation in ways that make

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a claim upon the belief of everyone. Journalists are supposed to discipline the news: that is why journalism is an ism. Historians are supposed to discipline the representation of the shared past. Yet, both disciplines are relatively undisciplined in that both realize that every member of society engages in something like their practice. Everyone continually updates their account of the world by engaging in some form of news practice; everyone continually reconstructs an image of the shared past while consuming vernacular representations of it in popular culture and political discourse. Historians and journalists recognize the continuity between their practice and popular practice. They do not deny the right of ordinary people to visit the National Archives or watch the State of the Union address, and in fact hope that as many people as possible will do these things with gusto. They do not secure their privileges the way medical doctors secure the authority to write prescriptions. Still, they insist that there is a difference between sound professional practice and the vernacular world. They just are not sure what this difference is. They know that sometimes the output of the best of the best in their field has turned out to be worse than what any ordinary person with common sense could produce. This is why both insist that their practice engage continually with the public. Neither journalists nor historians wish to or wish to be seen to speak only to their fellow professionals. For both historians and journalists, the crisis of the 1970s was something new and something old. Both had had crises in epistemology or in credibility before. In fact, their very professional organization had been a response to a crisis in credibility in the second half of the nineteenth century. The arrangement of affairs that formed the foundation of their respective professions had later come into crisis at similar points in time. So the crisis of the 1970s was very much a generational affair. But eventually a crisis that keeps on happening cannot be thought of as a crisis anymore. Instead, the collision of forces producing the crisis has to be rethought as constitutive of the discipline.

II History became a profession in the nineteenth century. In the conventional narrative of the historical profession, the original moment came in Germany, in the seminar of Leopold von Ranke. Ranke is remembered as using the seminar as his laboratory to refine in his

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students the scientific analysis of documents preserved in archives (Krieger 1977). The archives were themselves something relatively new: the organized records of nation-states and other institutions of similar scope. Historians who lionized Ranke believed that his version of historical research would free history from the unscientific captivity of tradition. In Germany this also meant rinsing out Hegel’s influence. The Rankean impulse was translated to other countries through the craft process of emulation. Scholars from abroad came to Germany, studied with Ranke or his students, and then returned to their home countries. In the United States, professionalized history was installed in a generation of new graduate programs built upon the German model at Johns Hopkins, in particular, and then the Ivys, and then the new land grant universities. A familiar constellation of U.S. universities came to dominate the production of professional historians: Hopkins, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Wisconsin. At these universities, doctoral students clustered in the seminars of professors and emulated their practice, often extending their grasp of the archives through inherited personal access. In general, in the west, professional history became established as a particular kind of practice with particular characteristics. The reliance on state archives tended to produce narratives in which the nation state was chief actor and the action was past politics. Not coincidentally, the actors were predominantly male. The historians were also predominantly male, and inscribed their masculinity into both their practices and the histories they produced (Smith 1998). The creation of history as a profession was an act of colonization. Professional historians occupied a territory within the much larger field of the representation of the human past. Within the walls they built, the authorized habits of representation were narrative reconstructions out of archival material of the growth of institutions through the actions of concrete identifiable individuals. These stories were told in the active voice, and monarchs, generals, popes, and thinkers were the agents. Outside the walls were barbarians and mystics. The barbarians were the ordinary folk, who remembered the past through legend and song. The mystics were sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and others who remembered by constructing ideal-typical models of behavior (Nisbet 1969). The very most mystical of the mystics were the philosophers of history, who proposed “speculative” narratives that endowed the past with meaning. Hegel stood as the most speculative

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of them, the exemplar of the thinker who could make all the concrete details of the past dissolve into a fog of Reason. To twenty-first century eyes, Hegel does not seem all that different from Ranke. That is, if anyone bothers to read Ranke at all.

III Journalism as an ism, the journalism that we recognize today as a “discipline of verification” (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2001, 3), came into being around the same time. The word journalism has a longer history. It was used earlier in the nineteenth century to refer to what we would today call polemics: essayists and pamphleteers who agitated on political issues were journalists. Newsgatherers were called either correspondents or reporters, not journalists. Correspondents were letter writers, sending in observations from distant places. Reporters did not observe, they faithfully recorded – similar to the usage in legal circles today, where a “reporter” is either a journalist recording court cases or a stenographer in the courtroom. Reporters for newspapers were meant to go to locations where news was produced – courtrooms, stock exchanges, hotels, speeches and sermons – and record what was said. At the end of the nineteenth century, the two positions, along with editorships of various sorts, came to be grouped together under the term “journalism” (Barnhurst and Nerone 2001). This is the logic of the naming of the weekly trade paper The Journalist, a marvelous source of craft discourse for journalism historians. At first there was no deep meaning to the new use of the term journalist. It was simply a term of convenience to cover all the various content-producing occupations in the newspaper world. But gradually over the course of the final decades of the nineteenth century it was filled with norms. It is difficult to assign formal epistemological value to these norms, and journalism historians will continue to argue about whether they resemble present-day practice (I think they do not). The norms themselves are fairly easy to catalog, though: political independence (which may or may not mean neutrality), integrity, autonomy, learning (which may or may not include university education in the liberal arts), worldliness, enterprise, gentility (which may or may not exclude someone like Joseph Pulitzer, or “Jewseph,” as The Journalist liked to call him). In establishing these norms, journalism as an ism performed an act of colonization within the larger native territory of news. Outside the

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walls again were the barbarians and mystics. The barbarians were the sensationalists, the yellow journalists, the entrepreneurs who worshipped the fetish of the marketplace. One of the basic purposes of professionalization was to protect news organizations from the reform movements that these barbarians inspired (McChesney and Scott 2004). The mystics were the partisans, reformers, and do-gooders who used the press to preach salvation. The massive foreign-language press and the growing African-American press were barbarian and mystic at the same time. The norms or traits that professionals enshrined made sociological but not intellectual sense. They distinguished journalism from other news practices, which were devalued as lower stages of the evolution of civilization. They allowed professionals to share a common identification by identifying their “other.” But they could support many different epistemologies, many different news practices, many different subjectivities. They do not amount to a theory of journalism.

IV Each generation of historians and journalists has produced its own “new history” and “new journalism,” and usually called it exactly that. The years following World War I saw the crystallization of prewar stirrings in both journalism and history into “objectivity” and “relativism,” respectively; the years following World War II produced “high modern” journalism and “consensus” or “counter-progressive” history; the era of decolonization struggles (the U.S. manifestations of which were the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War) produced “new journalism” and “New Left history”; and the post-Cold-War era has produced “civic,” “public,” “citizen,” and “crowd” journalism and, in history, postmodernism, the “cultural turn,” Foucauldian approaches, and globalization. I name the wars as the markers both for the sake of narrative convenience and to indicate how each moment answered to broad trends that were truly global in scale.

V At any point in time, there were thinkers who questioned the confident empiricism assumed by the first generation of professional journalists and historians. World War I made a lack of confidence seem

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like the least a thinking person could do. In the aftermath of World War I, systematic doubt became the norm in both fields. Journalism and history had professionalized around similar notions of collective knowledge production. Each individual journalist was an investigator looking for the truth by producing facts. For some, like beat reporters, this meant simply gathering the output of some piece of social machinery, like the police, courts or the stock markets. For others, like foreign correspondents, this meant a more involved and personal account of experiences in distant places. These individual accounts flowed through well-defined channels to specific editorial offices of newspapers, where they were processed into the newspaper form itself, which looked like a big stack of reports. Readers were supposed to take in all these and understand them as a snapshot of the world. The news was supposed to install the same worldview in each reader’s head. This way they could all be citizens together, electing the best men (not women yet) and assembling themselves into the powerful supervising intelligence of public opinion. For historians, the producer of knowledge was the trained investigator in the archives. Using the “philological” method, he (with a few exceptions) would engage with the amassed documents of an age or event, wooing and penetrating them, until the merging of his intelligence and their stored memory begat the one true account of the object studied. Each account was a brick, and all the bricks together would assemble themselves into a sublime cathedral of knowledge. The historians themselves were only the brick-makers (Novick 1988). The architect – God, Progress, Reason, Freedom, Humanity, Civilization – did not present Himself for documentary analysis. And again, the reader would behold this cathedral being built over the decades and would be uplifted into a purer citizenship. Could any intelligent participant have believed that this was what either profession was about? If that is what newspapers did, then why did there ever have to be more than one of them? If that is what histories did, then would not any good solid brick last forever and never need to be replaced? But there were historians, always discarding last generation’s history of whatever. And there were newsstands pushing their many and varied stock. And there were the readers, the public, their heads filled with the most unregulated stories. Intelligent participants perhaps would not have believed these accounts of their professions had they bothered to examine them, as a number did. Most did

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not. The accounts worked well, after all, to give collective meaning to their individually meaning-deprived work. The massive and undeniable failure of professional history and journalism in World War I made ordinary practitioners think a little harder about their collective enterprises. For journalism, Walter Lippmann (1922) most durably expressed the self-examination in his famous indictment of the mutually reinforcing dysfunctions of the impaired cognitive equipment of ordinary humans and of the distortions of the commercial basis of news organizations. Instead of distilling the real environment, Lippmann argued, the news media help construct a pseudo-environment. For historians, the parallel argument came from Carl Becker (1932), who pointed out that the work of professional historians, on the individual level, was not much different from the ways that ordinary people kept and used records for practical affairs, like paying the coal bill. Collectively, the work of historians was not much different from the work of the vernacular culture that preceded and competed with their accounts. Historians were singers of tales that would make the society and its government have an identity. Their work was irreducibly political. Lippmann’s and Becker’s demystifications of their chosen crafts were convincing enough to draw furious denunciations, and then became common sense. Professionals incorporated these critiques into a new sense of practice. For journalists, objectivity came to be the term of art. Objectivity in this sense meant a policing of reporting to root out the reporter’s subjectivity as well as to neutralize the influence of the factors that would distort the report: the lobbying of interested parties, the influence of stereotypes, the exigencies of the marketplace (Schudson 1978). For historians, Relativism was the term of art. Historians also had to become aware of the work that their work did in the world, and had to bring into visibility the deep social movements that tied them as observers to the histories they observed. Objectivity and Relativism sound like polar opposites. In practice, they were rather similar. Both reinserted the subjectivity of the practitioner. Both emphasized the practitioner’s engagement with, rather than separation from, the larger world being actively constructed. And both enlarged and intensified the practitioner’s mission in that world. The professions switched their basis from command of facts to the sophistication that comes from systematic doubt. Uncertainty replaced certainty as the source of the authority of journalists and historians.

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Their superior capacity for arriving at truths came from their trained ability to systematically question competing versions of Truth. The quality of truth became provisional, always subject to change and refinement, dependent on contingencies. And this ironically strengthened the professions. The new journalist and the new historian were charged with making truths that matter. They were required to think of themselves as agents. They were allies in the movements for progressive reform that preceded World War I and that re-emerged in response to the Great Depression. They positioned themselves in the vanguard of social change and claimed expanded authority because of their progressive commitments. At the same time, their recognition of subjectivity and relativism might have suggested to ordinary people that journalists and historians were no more reliable than anyone else when it came to telling true stories. This had, arguably, been the case in the run up to World War I. It has also been the case in dealing with the residue of the Civil War. One of the most productive sites of professional history writing had been the Civil War era, and, until the 1930s and 1940s, the dominant school of Civil War and Reconstruction historiography had been decidedly pro-South. Particularly repellent to present-day sensibilities was the work of William Dunning and his students at Columbia University, work that continued to infect grade school textbooks into the 1960s. It is because of work like Dunning’s that President Woodrow Wilson could acclaim the film Birth of a Nation as “history written with lightning.” When historians inspired by Becker’s relativism debunked Dunning’s history, the spectacle should have disenchanted observers inside the profession and out with the value of history itself. Instead, both historians and journalists experienced rising prestige in the World War II era.

VI Before World War II the substitution of systematic doubt as the basis of professionalization looked like it would produce endless contention. In many countries, this is exactly what happened. In Britain and France, for instance, contention between “new” histories and an established political history intensified and was enhanced after World War II by a revisionist strain of historiography informed by Marxism.

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In the U.S. however, the postwar period produced impressive, and some would say stifling, consensus (Higham 1973). This unexpected stability and consensus came from external influences rather than any internal adjustment to the epistemic foundations of the professions. Inside the apparent harmony of the professions there lay a foundation for the contentions that would flower in the next generation. In both history and journalism in the U.S., the broadest basis of postwar consensus was global and geopolitical. The Cold War world order presented U.S. opinion leaders a narrative of moral clarity that could resemble the clarity of World War II itself. Meanwhile, there did appear to be a truly global consensus on basic elements of liberal political philosophy, embodied most famously in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Postwar journalism and history both enjoyed growing structural security. Aspects of monopoly in the political economy of the media insured that journalism as a profession could project a confidence in the reliability of its version of the world that exceeded what was justified by facts on the ground. Bottlenecks in the wire services and in increasingly monopolized markets for daily newspapers made it easier for print news to claim to present “the news of the day,” rather than simply one version of the news. The situation in broadcasting amplified this. Licensing requirements even negligently enforced encouraged broadcasters to avoid controversial positions; strenuously enforced in the postwar period, licensing expectations produced a significant investment in news operations that would come to represent a high standard of professionalization. The professionalization of broadcast news intersected with the professionalization of print news in interesting ways as the two formats achieved a division of labor. Broadcasting claimed priority in breaking news and in sensual (visual, aural) appeal; this left print journalists free to develop longer forms of reporting and to claim depth and expertise in explanation. Together this allowed postwar journalism to achieve a moment of what Dan Hallin (1994) has called “high modernism.” All the while, good jobs continued to be created, and came to be filled more and more often with graduates of journalism programs at the university level. The Hutchins Commission and the FCC’s Blue Book represent a moment of assertive belief in the ability of news organizations to elucidate and define the shared goals and values of the entire society. Although these landmarks can also be understood as a statement of

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criticism of the structure of media industries, they also testify to an implicit assertion that news organizations could overcome that structure to achieve stewardship of the public sphere. Why give people responsibilities they lack the capacity to live up to? That these goals and values were fundamentally universal was the assumption of attempts at formulating normative press theory. A landmark in this regard was Four Theories of the Press (Siebert, Peterson and Schramm 1956). Often criticized for its simplicity and ethnocentrism (Nerone et. al. 1995; Curran and Park 2000; Hallin and Mancini 2004), it nevertheless represented a confidence shared by western journalism that the world could be remade, quickly, in the shape of liberal notions of human rights. Professional history also enjoyed growth and stability. After World War II, the so-called GI Bill, along with extraordinary investments in research universities by what Eisenhower called the “military industrial complex,” fed a tremendous growth in higher education, which meant training a new generation of faculty, largely from the white middle class, to occupy new jobs. Demographically, the incoming generation of professors was more diverse than previous ones – more Catholics and Jews, for instance – but the determining ideological influence was the World War II commitment to a liberal world order and the narrative of western civilization that underwrote it. History as a field was similar to the emerging field of communication research in this regard (Rogers 1994; Simpson 1996). Postwar historians found Becker’s relativism quaint. In a famous rejoinder, J.H. Hexter (1975) accepted Becker’s claim that the work of the historian was defined by one’s society, but pointed out that, for historians, the relevant society was not the Great Society of Wallis and Lippmann but the “society of professional historians.” Hexter’s point was convincing in a context in which professional historians enjoyed a significant amount of relative autonomy from the greater society. But this autonomy was contingent upon the comfortable material circumstances of historians and the absence of severe ideological debates within the profession and between the profession and the wider political community. When those conditions broke down, the insulation provided by the society of professional historians would also break down. Both journalists and historians enjoyed a respite. This calm arose out of the material circumstances of the professions, which allowed

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both to produce a thin but broad consensus. Neither consensus would survive scrutiny when put under pressure by events.

VII The 1970s saw the unraveling of a series of elements underlying consensus in both history and journalism. Confidence in the ideology of postwar liberalism did not survive the realities of the exercise of power. In the U.S. experience, two grand confrontations between liberal ideals and the power structure produced the Civil Rights movement and the opposition to the war in Vietnam. Although the habits of both journalists and historians tend toward local explanations, both of these should be understood as expressions of the global process of decolonization. King, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Rosa Parks are usually presented as organic products of the South. But all of them were also members in good standing of the international community of nonviolent activism. Journalists and historians reacted to both of these movements with a combination of authority and division. A long debate over the historiography of race and slavery had preceded the Civil Rights movement, and a generation of historians had produced work that served as a resource for movement activists; the authority of professional historians was a useful support for the creation of an anti-racist consensus among national leaders. At the same time, the profession remained predominantly white. Attempts to integrate the profession produced significant conflict within departments and scholarly organizations. Implied in these conflicts was a challenge to the construction of the prevailing narratives in the consensus version of U.S. history. Even as the “society of professional historians” came to the support of the Civil Rights movement, that movement implied a structural inequality within the society of professional historians that would make its authority suspect. A similar crisis occurred with the feminist movement that followed. If the default identity of the historian was white and male, could the work of historians really speak to the interests and histories of non-white, non-male subjects? Journalists experienced the Civil Rights movement in a similar way. Gradually journalism as a profession came to be supportive of the movement (Roberts and Klibanoff 2007). But journalism was at the time a white male profession, and responded relatively slowly to calls for integrating newsrooms. Implicit in those calls was the awareness

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that non-white non-males would report the world differently. So the professional authority of the journalist, like the professional authority of the historian, was called into question. The U.S. role in Vietnam fundamentally challenged the liberal narrative of the postwar geopolitical order. Attempts to write the U.S. presence in South Vietnam into the great story of the liberation of the developing world failed to persuade most of the world and an increasing fraction of the journalists and historians of the U.S. Both of these professional communities were torn apart; a subsequent generation would look to the dissidents within the profession as the heroic progenitors of a new new journalism and a new new history. For many historians, the New Left, controversial at the time, would be remembered as representing the best the discipline had to offer, while many mainstream historians of diplomacy, warfare, and international affairs would be forgotten, or worse, remembered as something of an embarrassment. For journalists, the critics of the war effort, like Seymour Hersh and David Halberstam, would become icons, and stand in for the performance of the profession as a whole, even though the bulk of the coverage for the bulk of the war was quite accommodating. For journalism, Watergate would team with Vietnam to constitute the proving grounds of collective memory for the profession. Journalists credentialed themselves by telling stories of how they had gone to Vietnam and exposed the lies of the official story. So this moment marked the coming into visibility of the contradictions within both professions. In the decade that followed, both would experience crises that would weaken their ability to agree on true stories and their authority to define what a true story was.

VIII By the end of the 1970s, the conditions were in place for the rise of postmodernism. These conditions included the collapse of the liberal consensus, and along with it the implosion of the classic modernist notion of the subject – now revealed as a construction; the disappearance of grand narratives as sources of moral grounding; the rise of subaltern populations with dissonant versions of history and politics; and the explosion of the media environment, especially the electronic media environment. Explanations for the authority of the professions of history and journalism collapsed along with their capacity for defining the common past and the news of the day.

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Within history, the stunning theoretical moment came with the publication of Hayden White’s (1971) Metahistory. White’s major argument – that any historical narrative was built on the basis of the “pre-critical” selection of literary tropes – seemed to undercut the distinction between history and fiction and to call into question any claim that a particular narrative might make on other historians or the general public. Greeted with outrage by old heads within the profession, Metahistory nevertheless found its way onto the bookshelves of every history graduate student in the following decades (I have two copies on my bookshelf. The cover fell off the marked up one years ago.). White’s later writings show less emphasis on the structuralist approach in Metahistory but continue to emphasize the politics of historical narrative. The theoretical critique might have passed with little impact were it not for material changes in the scholarly and political economy of the discipline. Historians continued to make bricks, crafting monographic narratives out of archival material. But, in the scholarly economy of history, arguments are pursued by producing more narratives with narrower focus. So, for instance, a debate about the role of ordinary people in the American Revolution is resolved by a generation of scholars producing monographs about the Revolution in individual provinces and individual cities. These do not resolve disputes so much as exhaust their participants; eventually fewer and fewer people care about the initial issue, and the debate becomes specialized to the point where there is a resolution by attrition. But the immediate effect, barring external limits, will be specialization, along with an overproduction of monographs. It will become impossible for any particular practitioner to maintain a master of any but the smallest specialization. In the 1930s through the 1950s, limits on the number of degree-granting schools and the supply of academic jobs kept these problems in check. But the rapid growth during the 1950s and 1960s began an inflationary cycle, and it only accelerated when the pace of creation of new faculty positions slowed down in the 1970s. That crunch produced an inflation in the level of scholarly productivity required to secure a job and promotion. So it became increasingly difficult for any particular historian to be competent. Already by the end of the 1970s the profession recognized a crisis in employment opportunities. Less apparent was the way that crisis intensified the epistemological problems underscored by structuralist, poststructuralist and postmodernist criticism.

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A landmark of recognition of this crisis came in 1988 with the publication of Peter Novick’s masterful history of the objectivity problem in history, That Noble Dream. Novick entitled the chapter dealing with the present “There is no King in Israel,” by which he meant that there was no longer any fundamental grounds for judging a particular narrative to be true, to have a claim on the belief of everyone in the nation. It was not clear whether he was happy about this. The absence of an authority governing under the mandate of objectivity seemed to weaken history as a profession, but at the same time it seemed to liberate individual historians from what had become an untenable position. Now everyone can be one’s own grand theorist. The liberation of historians from the yoke of the brick maker ethos is indeed happy news for those historians who have good jobs. They are free to build a multicultural profession, housing incommensurable correct communities. But they lack the moral authority to lecture the people. The 1990s and beyond have witnessed a long series of “memory wars” in the various western countries, and historians have struggled to claim the expertise to rule on the merits of, say, the Smithsonian’s 1995 Enola Gay exhibit, or the virtues of the professions “standards” for teaching history in primary and secondary schools. Such battles will not go away. As I write this, political activists on the right are producing a new wave of fetishism about the Founding Fathers, about which the objections and corrections of professional historians will matter little if at all. The clever ones will hop on for the ride. Even when the profession speaks with one voice on matters of common concern – the historical reality of the Holocaust, for instance – the impact on popular memory is uncertain. Part of this failure of authority is not the fault of the profession, then. It is the fault of the larger environment of public communication, and so of the profession of journalism. Journalism’s experience moved at a slightly different rhythm, but followed the same tune. The successes that journalists claimed in ending the war in Vietnam and evicting Richard Nixon from the White House on the basis of Watergate-era revelations encouraged the rise of a heroic image of the investigative journalist as the superego of the profession. A sudden turnaround came with the 1983 Grenada invasion, in which the Reagan administration enjoyed broad popular support in spite of, or because of, its exclusion of journalists from the immediate action. The news industry discovered that it had a “credibility” problem, and began an obsessive campaign of instructing

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the public about the importance of journalism to the health of the Republic. Thus, for instance, the Gannett-funded First Amendment Center, with its annual reports on the State of the First Amendment, designed primarily to measure public support for a vigorous journalism establishment. The results of such polling revealed, along with shocking ignorance of the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, an apparent suspicion of the privilege enjoyed by news organizations in exercising the freedom of the press. Public disapproval of journalism matched public awareness of the rise of the “media monopoly” (Bagdikian 1983). Humbled by this weak showing in approval ratings, journalism as an institution became more concerned with displaying impeccable behavior. Mark Hertsgaard ridiculed this posture in the title to his 1988 book on press coverage of the Reagan Administration, On Bended Knee. The weakened posture of professional journalists coincided with a new wave of scholarship on the “manufacture of news” (Tuchman 1980; Gans 1979; Schudson 1978). Scholars studying news routines, the sociology of newsrooms, and the literary conventions of objective reporting seemed to working journalists to echo the corrosive disregard of political activists and the general public for the hard empirical work of reporting. It seemed to contribute to the inexorable diminution of the professional journalist. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the raw number of journalism positions continued to grow. But that is not how it seemed. As news organizations merged into publicly owned corporate conglomerates, journalists increasingly complained about the war of attrition they had to fight against the relentless logic of the quarterly report. Alarm about what happens when “MBAs Rule the Newsroom” (Underwood 1993) actually echoed what academic critics had to say. As a smart journalist said to me, “Sure Chomsky has a point, but I have the right to say it. When he says it, it hurts the profession.” The corporate concentration of the news industry coincided ironically with an increase in the number of new channels. So the weakening of the professional reporter coincided with the weakening of the news industry as a whole to dictate “the news of the day.” This was not the de-professionalization that thoughtful scholars had called for (Carey 1978, 1997). Instead, the way out of hell was through Drudge and Limbaugh. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the most

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remarkable feature of the emerging world of broadcast, cable, and digital news was the rise of what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (1999) call the “journalism of assertion.”

IX In their history of objectivity in science, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2010) refer to what they call “objectivity in shirtsleeves.” By this they mean not the refined theory of how knowledge is generated, but the ways in which the instruments and routines of scientists produced particular ways of representing the real. What practitioners do in shirtsleeves may or may not eventually be articulated in norms and standards. It has been a long time since intelligent journalists and historians believed in the simple facticity of their craft. But they have not significantly modified their toolkits in response. Historians no longer believe in the brick maker ethos, but they all still know how to make bricks. And that is all their tenure committees know how to rate. Journalists are cynical about interviewing empowered sources – they know everything that Lance Bennett (2007) wants to tell them. But they do not really have another way to do their business. So what counts for truth among journalists and historians is what they recognize as produced in the responsible way. In practice, for historians, this means looking at everything relevant to your object of study with an open mind; even though historians recognize that “everything” is impossible and an “open mind” is a fiction, still, you are not doing your job if you do not try. Journalists have similar rules of thumb about asking questions of the right people and showing suitable skepticism. Although it is the best answer right now for the problem of truth, objectivity in shirtsleeves is neither as convincing as an epistemology (because it is not an epistemology), nor as reliable as a way of policing falsehoods and manipulations. Journalists, for instance, knew quite well in 2002 and 2003 that the Bush administration was conducting a massive campaign to convince the public that Iraq posed a clear and present danger to the U.S. They were skeptical of what they were encouraged to report. They reported it responsibly in that they followed the “best practices” of their craft within the limitations of their resources. So that reporting, false as its contents turned out to be, was true enough, true in shirtsleeves. And the “journalism of

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assertion” of opponents of the Bush administration, though it turned out to be right, did not meet that standard.

X Historians and journalists both recognize the perishability of their truths. It is that realization that makes their professional practice both privileged and necessary. If the truth were nonperishable, then we really would not need professional journalists or historians. It is because the truth is always a matter of adjustment that we need these professions to engage in a process of continual updating. They are there to keep the contest for public opinion alive and somewhat fair. The truth of these professions is and always has been about maintaining a reasonable arena of representation so that a fiction of public intelligence can be believed in and acted upon. If there is something to be alarmed about in the present situation, it is not the belief in the provisionality of truth or the partiality of truth or the importance of viewpoint to the representation of truth. It is the practical impossibility of maintaining reasonable boundaries on the representations of truth that respect the intelligence of the public. Public intelligence as a regulative fiction has been shown to be vulnerable to the current failure of journalism and history to police truth. Historians and journalists now are less able to inflict a penalty for lying. Poll results that show the prevalence of “birthers” among Republicans or the vast numbers of “truthers” and Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists among the general population might lead one to believe that the public is an idiot. But it would be hard to argue that the public was ever much better informed – especially not so in the age of scientific racism, for instance. But it is not the weakness of public intelligence per se that is alarming; it is the weakness of the belief in public intelligence. It is the belief in public intelligence that allows it to function as a regulative fiction. We are all supposed to agree to behave as if the public were intelligent enough to know if we are lying and to punish us for it. Exposure in the news media is supposed to have immediate consequences as a result. But in the age of the journalism of assertion, in the age of the memory wars, and in the age of push polls, tracking polls, and focus groups, public intelligence as a regulative fiction has all but ceased to operate. One longs for the authority of the profession not because it did such a good job of informing the public but because it weakened the

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confidence that people could exploit the ignorance of the public with impunity.

REFERENCES Bagdikian, Ben. 1983. The Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press. Barnhurst, Kevin G. and John Nerone. 2001. The Form of News: A History. New York: Guilford. Becker, Carl. 1932. “Everyman Man His Own Historian.” American Historical Review 37: 234-50. Bennett, W. Lance, Regina G. Lawrence and Steven Livingston. 2007. When the Press Fails. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Carey, James W. 1978. “A Plea for the University Tradition.” Journalism Quarterly 55: 846-55. Carey, James W. 1997. “The Communications Revolution and the Professional Communicator.” In James Carey: A Critical Reader. Eve S. Munson and Catherine A. Warren, eds., 128–143. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Curran, James and Myung-Jin Park. 2000. De-westernizing Media Studies. New York: Routledge. Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. 2010. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books. Gans, Herbert. 1979. Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. New York: Random House. Hallin, Daniel C. 1994. “The Passing of the ‘High Modernism’ of American Journalism.” In We Keep America on Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere, 152-61. New York: Routledge. Hallin, Daniel C. and Paolo Mancini. 2004. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hertsgaard, Mark. 1988. On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Hexter, Jack H. 1975. Doing History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Higham, John. 1973. History: Professional Scholarship in America. New York: Harper. Kovach, Bill and Tom Rosenstiel. 1999. Warp Speed. New York: Crown. Kovach, Bill and Tom Rosenstiel. 2001. The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. New York: Crown.

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Krieger, Leonard. 1977. Ranke: The Meaning of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lippmann, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan. McChesney, Robert W. and Ben Scott, eds. 2004. Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism. New York: New Press. Nerone, John, et al. 1995. Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the Press. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Nisbet, Robert A. 1969. Social Change and History. New York: Oxford University Press. Novick, Peter. 1988. That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. New York: Cambridge University Press. Roberts, Gene and Hank Klibanoff. 2007. The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. New York: Vintage. Rogers, Everett. 1994. A History of Communication Study: A Biographical Approach. New York: Free Press. Schudson, Michael. 1978. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books. Siebert, Fred, Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm. 1956. Four Theories of the Press. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Simpson, Christopher. 1996. Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Bonnie. 1998. The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tuchman, Gaye. 1980. Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: Free Press. Underwood, Doug. 1993. When MBAs Rule the Newsroom. New York: Columbia University Press. White, Hayden. 1971. Metahistory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Why Journalism Has Always Pushed Perception Alongside Reality

T

Barbie Zelizer

he title of this conference and book project – “Assessing evidence in a postmodern world” – rests on a number of suppositions that I want to call into question at the beginning of my chapter. One is what we mean by assessing. Though one of the things we do to accrue cultural authority is assess the evidence we are faced with – and journalists, as spokespeople for the unfolding events of the real world, are no exception – I want to raise the oft-argued position that we have overstated a certain model of assessment and that we need to think more clearly about a different kind of relationship with the evidence we find. In fact, beyond the often-assumed idea that value can be assigned just by virtue of observing and evaluating presenting characteristics, a second valence surrounds the word “assessment.” Though the former has long been our default setting for thinking about how to relate to evidence, this second stance denotes activity of a more aggressive and strategic nature. It is what we attribute to home appraisers, tax consultants, insurance adjusters – where assessing means fixing a value to what surfaces based on imported categories of what matters, not just allowing value to emerge naturally from what presents. Assessing, in this second view, might be thought of as a more forceful and directed activity than we have tended to think until now. Two is what we mean by evidence. While one of the earliest notions underlying the idea of “evidence” had to do with establishing grounds for belief, its surfacing in legal discourse from the sixteenth century onward cemented an association with proof, reason and rationality,

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and it is in that regard that we tend to use it. But there exists a whole slew of material out there in the world that seems to have no evidentiary value because it does not fit that mindset, and so it gets largely discounted. Messiness, hesitation, emotions, imagination, contingency, contradiction, qualification all often go under the radar of the evidentiary envelope, even if they exist plentifully in the world. This means that the evidence we pay attention to does not always best reflect what is; nor does it signal how partial that evidence remains. In fact, in many cases, evidence reflects more about things as we want them to be than about how things are on their own terms. Three is what we mean by postmodern. The assumption has been that its reigning traits – its liquidity (to quote Bauman), fluidity (to quote Giddens), relativity, instability and shifting positions – somehow are expected to change the fundaments of our relation to the evidence that we find. But how new are these traits? The very lexical impossibility of naming a period “post” while going through it is problematic on its own, but its claim to distinctiveness further weakens when we focus not on what differs from early to later modernity, but on what stays the same. For though postmodernity is defined by its positioning of perception and perspective alongside reality and sometimes even in place of it, core aspects of our longstanding relationship to evidence have always pushed these bedfellows in equal doses, long before postmodernity made current such a turn. So, with apologies to the conference and book organizer, I would like to think about the relevance of these terms by focusing on an area I know best – news images. As second-class citizens, these are important tools for thinking about how evidentiary values work, particularly because images are so important in times of crisis. What I hope to do is show how and why a close look at journalism’s pictures forces a rethinking of what we expect when assessing evidence in a postmodern world. And in doing this, I am wavering between a discussion of evidence itself and a meta conversation about what we think we are saying when we focus on it. I am going to make an argument about the form and content of news, and how, in privileging the former – as Tuchman argued long ago and Glasser reminds us – we may be losing the latter, all of which connects to the available modes for assessing evidence in the news. A few words about journalism to begin with. The assessment of evidence plays a central role for journalists attempting to differentiate

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themselves from their surroundings. Journalists claim they do it better and more reliably, offer necessary context and explanation in a way few others can do, and know how to carefully select the evidence that most fully approximates the circumstances to which it points. And yet as important is what is not said – that journalists assess strategically all the time, that evidence often falls through the cracks of newsmaking routines, that what we think we know we may not be able to prove, that what we are told about the world reflects larger assumptions that are often as central as what is being covered. These are the material conditions to which Nerone refers to in his chapter. Journalism is cluttered with the tensions that arise between the rhetoric of what journalists say they do and the reality of what unfolds on the ground. And nowhere does this become more the case than when thinking about the global flow of news, where the capacity to assess evidence is undermined, and sometimes even neutralized, by noise – spatial and temporal distance, cultural variation, inflexible ways of understanding difference, to name just a few. Noise sometimes becomes so great that it exceeds the capacity of any given news organization to cover the events and circumstances it is responsible for. And yet we need coverage and demand that it take a certain form. Prominent here is a dispassionate approach to evidence, a privileging of the facts over the fantasy, a play to coherence and congruity even if the world has none. This quandary forces journalists to compensate for the limitations of the evidence they find but also forces them to be quiet about doing so. In other words, it is no surprise that journalists regularly rely on perspective, push perception over reality and import categories of what matters to assess the evidence they find. We just do not like it thrown in our faces. I want to hone in on three sets of tensions that journalists regularly navigate in doing newswork: the connection between simplicity and complexity – how the complexity of real life needs to be compressed intelligibly into a news story or camera’s frame; the global/ local connection – by which the increasingly wide scope of global news necessitates a different, often tenuous relation with the local venues on which news unfolds; and the past/present connection – where the past looms increasingly relevant in a journalistic environment that has always prided itself on playing to the present but has insufficient tools for embracing its lack of certainty.

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Longstanding attributes of visual news coverage – a play to the familiar, the memorable, the dramatic, the schematic – force a patterned resolution of these tensions. In each case, journalism primarily migrates to one side of the connection, banking evidence by privileging simple over complex, global over local, past over present. Because these impulses surface in tandem, when combined they offer a powerful compression of the evidence that journalists are charted with addressing. We can see how all of this happens by looking at one individual photo. The photo I chose, shows a statue-dismantling in Baghdad’s Firdus Square in April of 2003. I choose this photo to discuss here because it has been discussed so widely elsewhere. The central focus of three different academic studies, multiple public discussions, and a recent essay in the New Yorker, it has itself become an event, a critical incident by which all of journalism’s observers and critics can debate an ongoing set of anxieties about evidence and journalism so relevant to the topic of this conference and book project. Taken at the beginning of the latest Iraq war, the picture depicted what was then hoped to be a turn in the war’s fortunes, a revolution against the regime of Saddam Hussein. But in fact, what its circulation, reception and discussion established was everything but. It offered instead a diminution of complexity, a cannibalization of local nuances within the news story and a minimization of the contemporary context against which to understand the photo and the event, which it depicted in lieu of a celebration of its historical parallels. The assessment of evidence, then, was performed but in ways markedly different from what journalists and other purveyors of evidence are expected to provide. The question, then, is whether the bigger problem is that the evidence or our expectations of it are at fault. I am going to argue the latter.

Complex Evidence, Simple News The fact that journalists regularly and systematically simplify the complexities of the worlds on which they report is not new. This is the heart of journalistic storytelling, and we have long lamented journalism’s predilection for the formulaic, dramatic, easily understood and accessible aspects of the news. As the exigencies surrounding journalism become more tenuous, we have become simultaneously more and less tolerant of journalism’s need to figure out new presentational

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routines to stay afloat – so too with pictures. The move to simplify almost always comes at the expense of the comprehensively told. Issues of cropping, framing, focus, light, context and positioning as well as background staging are all tools by which journalism engages its viewers, and as journalists have become responsible for more kinds of mediated stages than ever before – often producing the same product for print, electronic and digital platforms – the parameters of what counts as simple have narrowed. It should then be no surprise that journalists often orient all their tools toward shaping one particular meaning of what they show, using the lowest common denominator in which to show it. In that light, they have developed patterned modes of presentation that often short circuit what we hold dear about evidence and what we like to think goes on in its assessment. In other words, issues of form tend to determine issues of content because it is the most effective way for journalists to do their work. This picture, for instance, came to signify far more than what might seem initially evident. Toppling this statue of Saddam Hussein was one of the most widely distributed and discussed pictures of the war. Taken on April 9, it extracted one frame from a series of visuals depicting a sequence of action that took place over two short hours, when a crowd of Iraqis in a central Baghdad square milled about the statue and then – with help – brought it to the ground. At the end of that sequence of action, the picture prematurely (and erroneously) was pronounced a signal image of the war’s end. Today, nearly eight years later, the war continues and debates rage over what happened in between those two points in time – who initiated the action (Iraqis or the U.S. military), who watched the action (Iraqis, U.S. military, or foreign media), who pushed the action’s interpretation (U.S. military or foreign media). Debates also rage over the status of the evidence itself – how representative was the square of the rest of Baghdad or to what degree was the event strategically chosen (and by whom). In photojournalist Peter Maas’ view, the only thing the picture emblematized was “the fact that American troops had taken the center of Baghdad” – and not, as was claimed, “victory for America, the end of the war, joy throughout Iraq.” In other words, as more and more people discussed the photo, the event it depicted became more and more complex, the evidence less and less reliable. What did we learn? It was true that the U.S. military, in tanks, seized Firdus Square, that a group of Iraqis tried to dismantle the

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statue with a sledgehammer and rope, that an American flag was briefly draped over the statue’s head, then replaced with an Iraqi flag, and that the statue was eventually brought down – at the request of the Iraqis – by a Marine vehicle equipped with a crane. But it was also true that the square was never more than a quarter full (a fact hid by the photo’s close cropping), that the crowd grew – whether naturally or by invitation – from start to finish, that most Iraqis did no more than throw dirt on the statue, that the American flag was only up for a minute and a half, and that the Iraqi flag it replaced belonged to an American soldier. The evidentiary value of the photo was thus suspect – at least in terms of the expectation that it might reference some kind of naturally occurring value – and journalists’ assessment of it was seen as problematic too. For it was also true that nearly the entire foreign news media were headquartered at the Palestine Hotel, adjacent to Firdus Square, and easily watched the tanks that cordoned off the square. The media hyped the event – a true photo-op – because they were there and able to run with the story. As Maas told it, journalists were primed for triumph. “They were ready to latch onto a symbol of what they believed would be a joyous finale to the war,” and they had “an aesthetically perfect representation of that preconception” to push the vision forward. For that reason, reporters themselves later contended that their editors made them play up the joyousness of what unfolded, even when they had not seen it themselves. In other words, what was shown drew more from what the U.S. media wanted it to mean than what actually happened on the ground. But is our disgruntlement with the picture of the statue-toppling driven only by a discomfort with what it showed or also by our limited notions of how evidence should be assessed? Journalists did what they always do: they turned to a proven visual formula – pictures of defaced representations of fallen leaders that date back to pre-media times – and they did so because that formula allowed instant and accessible meaning to be attached to the photo with little need for extensive verbal explanation. In other words, if seen as evidence that reflected the media’s imported categories of what mattered – finding a simple, easily understood image that could accommodate the play to form while not undermining content – the photo did what it needed to do. And that remains the case even if the complex nature of the circumstances it depicted were not fully captured within it.

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Local Evidence, Global News A similar quandary occurs in the tension between local and global. As journalists are held increasingly accountable for events beyond the immediate proximity of a given news organization (how local is local news anymore?), they need to make decisions about how much local information can reliably and effectively play to a distant (and generally unknowledgeable) public. Though there are always more aspects of the local than can be factored into any circulating news item, when one story or picture claims to stand in for the whole, the move to familiar forms becomes an even more useful way of accommodating the importation of already-formed categories of what matters. It is here that signal pictures come to stand in for potentially disparate events occurring elsewhere, as local nuances – the hesitations, contradictions, incongruities – that accompany almost any news story’s unfolding are removed from coverage, displaced by a play instead to clear similarities with other events from other places, all of which perform more effectively on a global stage. Here too, we see a systematic privileging of form over content, as journalists look for photos that can easily play for varied audiences around the globe. This means that the story took a similar form wherever it traveled, and many local aspects of the story were shunted from coverage. While an end to the war was heralded in Firdus Square, multiple battles raged elsewhere, what CBS called “total anarchy.” Even the novelty of the statue dismantling was locally overturned, for British forces had earlier destroyed a similar statue in Basra, but because the event was not photographed or filmed, it drew little attention. Two days before the Firdus Square events, American forces toppled a statue of Hussein on horseback outside the Republican Palace in Baghdad. But there were no Iraqis present, few Americans, and an uninspiring surrounding landscape. Thus, the event remained thinly covered. And yet despite the compression of local nuance, as this picture circulated globally, its form was celebrated. So powerful that it leaked into other events, imagined and real, it surfaced in parallel form within months in a variety of geographic locations – in discussions of a hoped-for regime change in a statue of Christopher Columbus going down in Venezuela, transforming what had been till then the Day of the Discovery of America into the Day of Indigenous Resistance. We also see it in the facsimiles of statues

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of George W. Bush being toppled in Canada; or in statues of North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung in demonstrations in South Korea. Significantly, in each case, the depiction proclaimed more about what was hoped than what transpired. For of course, a people’s revolution did not occur – not in Iraq, nor in anyplace else. Rather, we saw the imagination of a more equitable, possibly democratic regime as a message that resonated globally. Again, evidence holding fast to imported categories about what matters, even if those categories, driven by a familiar form, do not fully reflect the messiness in content.

Present Evidence, Past News We see similar impulses in the tension between present and past. While journalists are routinely charted with covering the present of news, where they offer that much-cited “first draft of history,” they in fact regularly travel backward in time, using retrospectives, anniversary journalism, revisits to old events as a way of assessing contemporary news. So too do pictures bring back the past, though often in far more subtle ways. From the moment Hussein’s statue was tackled, the historic parallels about statue toppling at other points in time shouted for attention – even before it was clear what kind of history was in the making. This is not incidental, for journalism often moves to the past, when information about the present is unclear, unavailable or incongruent. Falling statues perform well in this regard, for evidence of statue toppling dates long before the media were ever around to show their pictures and images of felled statues have appeared in the news from the times of the U.S. Civil War onward. Coverage of the Cold War was filled with them, when events like the 1956 Hungarian Revolution cemented images of statues toppling into the visual memory of regime change. It was no surprise, then, that within minutes of the first TV visuals streaming globally from Firdus Square, the networks proclaimed the statue’s demise-in-progress as “historic.” CNN called it a “seminal moment in the nation’s history,” recalling the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and later juxtaposing images from 1989 with those of 2003. Fox News, ABC and CBS all heralded the historic nature of the event, while Katie Couric called the photo a “lasting symbol” of the war. As the shots were repeatedly displayed over the day – according to Sean Aday and others, on average once every four and a half minutes on Fox News, once every seven and a half minutes on CNN – they became

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a branding device to promote upcoming coverage. It was not long before the parallels were adopted elsewhere, as when then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld proclaimed, “Watching (the Iraqis), one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.” The play to the past was thus instrumental in helping pictures of the present play as they did. Here too, the value of the evidence rested upon imported and proven categories of what mattered, even if they introduced unevenness in what was depicted. Form again took over content.

Conclusion So what have we learned here about how journalists assess evidence in this postmodern moment? I have argued that journalists regularly migrate away from the noise, tentativeness and incongruity in the circumstances they cover. That is why they use pictures of the simple to cover the complex, pictures of the distant to cover the proximate and local, and pictures of the past to cover the present. These modes of assessing evidence all push perception alongside (and often at the expense of ) reality, and, as has been argued, undermine a fuller understanding of the reality behind the evidence. There is no question that this is a real problem. But to tackle it, we need to ask ourselves if we are effectively poised for its resolution. For I have not yet articulated what should by now be the most obvious point. Journalists play to the simple, the global and the past because that is where they can find the evidentiary qualities – of reason, rationality, certainty, clarity – that allow them to navigate the tensions between the kind of relationship with evidence that we expect them to have and the kind of relationship that circumstances on the ground make available. For as long as the complex, the local and the present continue to accommodate a lack of closure, hesitation, noise, heightened incongruity and contradiction (and given the texture of experience, why would that ever change?), journalists will continue to migrate elsewhere in culling the evidence of news. Their mode of engagement, driven by simplicity, global address, and the past, is thus their solution to the problems that assessing evidence in contemporary newswork raises. This obviously has its price. For as we have seen, journalism’s push for form inevitably undermines content. And so we come back to the

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question I raised earlier – is the bigger problem the evidence or our expectations of it? I still maintain the latter. We need to think more creatively about how the ground for assessing evidence affects the assessment we get. Either we have to develop a regard for a different kind of relationship with evidence or we have to be more tolerant about losing the news content that the old relationship requires. I do not think we can do both.

The Indecisive Moment Snapshot Aesthetics as Journalistic Truth

Andrew L. Mendelson As the nature of reporting capabilities changes, the nature of news itself changes also (Szarkowski 1973, 5). Photojournalists are yesterday’s heroes…Few photographers are any longer seen as providing definitive information about some national or international trouble spot, at least very few who are what used to be called professionals…The proliferation of amateur photographs and videos on the internet has swamped whatever sense there was of photojournalists and their editors as gatekeepers, providing judgment and oversights (Perl 2011).

I

n 2002, in Osaka, Japan, an ATM exploded and a bystander with a recent invention, a mobile phone with a built-in camera, snapped a photo of the scene. This amateur photograph, made with a low-resolution camera, went on to win a photojournalism award. One contest judge presciently noted: “The penetration of the keitai camera [keitai is the Japanese term for mobile phones] has made a photojournalist of everyone in the country” (as quoted in Kato et al. 2005, 307). Since then, many events have been recorded and disseminated as still photographs or video taken with camera phones wielded by amateurs, often scooping professional photojournalists. The 2004 Asian tsunami presented dramatic images of waves of water cresting over homes, cars and entire communities, recorded by tourists and residents days before professional journalists would arrive (Srinivas 2005). Survivors trapped in smoke-filled tunnels photographed the

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2005 London subway bombings. One image, of survivor Adam Stacey standing in front of the open doors of a subway car covering his mouth with a cloth, was first posted to a British blog, and not to a mainstream news outlet. The image was selected as one of the best news photographs of 2005 by Time Magazine (Dear 2006). A passenger on a passing ferry, with an iPhone, made an image of a passenger airplane making an emergency landing on the Hudson River in 2009. Participants and bystanders made dramatic photographs of protests and revolutions spreading from North Africa and the Middle East to the United States with the Occupy movements. The images revealed people rallying together in defiance of governments; people being attacked by police and armies; countless victims of these attacks; and finally, in some cases, people triumphant in overthrowing dictators (Batty 2011). Rescued passengers sent photographs out via Twitter from the lifeboats of a cruise ship that crashed off the coast of Italy in January 2012 (McClorey 2012). What do these incidents over the past decade have in common? All of these events were documented through photographs and videos produced by non-professional journalists (or by people who would not consider themselves as journalists) with non-professional grade equipment, most often cellphones, then distributed through non-traditional news outlets, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Flickr. Prior to the invention of the camera phone in 2000 (Sharp History), the worlds, the practitioners and the aesthetics of photojournalism and snapshot photography seldom overlapped. The aesthetics of snapshot photographs brings a visual rhetoric different from that of professionally produced news photographs. My goal in this chapter is to interrogate the aesthetics of camera phone images for what it suggests about the changing nature of journalistic truth. I begin by tracing the distinct histories of snapshot and news photography, and their accompanying aesthetics.

The Rise of “Kodak Culture” Prior to the 1880s, few amateurs, apart from wealthy dilettantes, had the time, money and skills to make photographs. Photographs, for most people, required going to a photography studio to have formal portraits produced, portraits modeled after painted portraits. For those amateurs engaged in photography, most focused on fine art work, including romantic portraits and landscapes, and the practice

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required knowledge of complicated cameras and chemical processes (Taft 1938/1964). While people did begin to build a family photographic history through albums, the photographs contained in them were all professionally produced (Holland 1997). The idea of photography produced and consumed by families would have been unthinkable. Everything changed with the subsequent inventions of dry photographic plates in the 1870s, flexible roll film shortly after, George Eastman’s Kodak camera in 1888, and his Brownie camera line in 1900. Each of these inventions increasingly opened photography to those with only an interest in producing photographs, not in the previously required skills in chemistry and aesthetics, nor the financial resources to support the interest. Step by step, each of these inventions eliminated the required knowledge of chemistry and the mechanics of the camera. With the Kodak and Brownie cameras, costs for equipment were reduced so significantly to $25 and $1, respectively, that almost anyone could afford to be his/her own photographer (Collins 1990). Further, no knowledge of chemistry was required at all; the camera and film were shipped back to Eastman Company for processing. Thus the Kodak slogan: “You push the button; we do the rest” (Collins 1990). Without the need for bulky equipment and significant training, personal photography changed. People began to make photographs in more casual and haphazard ways and circumstances (Collins 1990; Mensel 1991). “Informality and relaxed poses began to replace the frozen, grim-faced portraits typical of daguerreotype and wet-plate days. Spontaneity increasingly came to be seen as a prerequisite of authenticity” (Carlebach 1997, 22). This casualness was enhanced by the lack of a viewfinder on the earliest consumer cameras: just point and shoot. The only limitation was the cost of film, which, while allowing a greater variety of subjects than earlier years, still limited how often cameras were used (Chalfen 1987; Mensel 1991). Personal photographs, variously called snapshots or domestic photographs, were (and still are) highly ritualized and conventional in terms of content and aesthetics (Chalfen 1987; Sarvas and Frohlich 2007). Chalfen (1987) referred to all the practices associated with personal photography as “Kodak Culture.” People learned appropriate subject matter for personal photographs, as well as the conventional style, from the people around them as well as from Kodak advertising

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(Kotchemidova 2005; Sarvas and Frohlich 2007). In the age of film cameras, people mainly photographed family and friends during specific milestone events and planned leisure activities (Chalfen 1987; Kotchemidova 2005). Snapshots were produced by us, to be consumed by us. Many times these photographs, even when placed in albums, had little context beyond a date and the names of some of the subjects seen in the images. Much was left unstated, requiring the knowledge of the cast of characters and previous experiences to truly understand the narratives (Holland 1997). As Chalfen (1987) suggested: “The narrative remains in the heads of the picturemakers and on-camera participants for verbal telling and re-telling during exhibition events” (70). Still, as Greenough (2007b) stated: “From our own experiences, we instinctively know when viewing snapshots like these that they, unlike many carefully crafted works of art or fully articulated documents, possess a kind of truth that is both profound and unassailable” (152). This “unassailable” truth is an essential part of amateur camera phone photographs of news, as I will discuss later in the chapter.

The Rise of Photojournalism Photographs began being used for news not long after the invention of photography in 1839, even though photographs could not be directly reproduced in publications until the late 1800s with the invention and adoption of the halftone process. Beginning with the London Illustrated News in 1842, many publications used illustrations derived from photographs to increase circulation (Carlebach 1992; Taft 1938/1964). By the turn of the twentieth century, newspapers and magazines were deriving new publication formats to better link photographs and text, including Sunday supplements and, later, the picture magazines such as Life and Look (Barnhurst and Nerone 2001; Carlebach 1992; Taft 1938/1964). “By the 1890s the camera and pen were partners in daily and weekly journalism” (Carlebach 1997, 12). Throughout this early tentative history of photojournalism, one thing that was not there was spontaneity. Photographs through the end of the 1800s required intention, planning and training, as the cameras were large, requiring a tripod. Even into the mid-twentieth century, newspaper photographers relied on cameras larger (and more adjustable and light sensitive) than those used by amateurs, such as the Graflex and Speed Graphic, that, while no longer requiring a

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tripod, allowed for only one or two shots before reloading (Collins 1990; Kobre 2008). Through the invention of flexible film, and then the invention of lightweight cameras such as the Ermanox or the Leica in the mid-1920s, photojournalism, especially as practiced by magazine photographers, became more spontaneous. Regardless, there was still an expected level of training to control the more complicated cameras and to process negatives and prints to produce professional quality photographs. Beginning in the 1920s, photojournalism professionalized further, distinguishing itself from other types of photography, including art photography and amateur/personal photography. There was an increased use of photographer bylines in publications (Becker 1985). Textbooks on news photography appeared, such as Kinkaid’s Press Photography (1936), Featherstonhaugh’s Press Photography with the Miniature Camera (1939), and Vitray, Mills and Ellard’s Pictorial Journalism (1939). In 1943, the University of Missouri became the first university to offer courses in news photography (Kobre 2008). Soon after, in 1946, news photographers formed a professional organization, the National Press Photographers Association, in order to codify standards and ethics. This organization held workshops and conferences to further train news photographers in best practices. Standards were enshrined through news photography competitions and awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize for photography (1942), the Pictures of the Year Competition (1944) and the World Press Photo (1955). All of these steps ensured that news photography encompassed conventional news values of timeliness and objectivity (Barnhurst and Nerone 2001), and acquired a “formula” aesthetic that connoted these values (Rosenblum 1978, 428; see also Hagaman 1996). The definitive statement of this professionalized photojournalistic aesthetic was captured by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s (1952) concept of the “Decisive Moment,” a phrase and concept still venerated in photojournalism education. “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” For Cartier-Bresson and other professional news photographers, true news photography requires not just happenstance, but clear planning and recognition to capture the most significant content in a well organized, aesthetically compelling way. Even with the newer, lighter weight cameras, photojournalists distinguished themselves

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by their ability to control the camera to meaningfully compose their subjects.

A Tale of Two Aesthetics Given the distinct histories of snapshot and news photography, it is not surprising that there has been little overlap between the conventional aesthetics of each. For the most part, the aesthetics of snapshots were seldom used for interpreting public events for a mass audience. This style was used for interpreting personal experiences for private consumption. There were certainly exceptions, as when amateurs were in the right place when a significant news event occurred, such as Arnold Hardy’s 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a woman falling from a hotel fire in Atlanta (Greenough 2007b), the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, and the video of the Rodney King beating. Likewise, a photojournalistic style was seldom used for recording private moments, with the main exception being the recent trend of documentary-style wedding photography. Snapshot photographs were most often posed, with the subjects looking directly into the camera, in a frontal view, often smiling (Kotchemidova 2005). Since the subjects and the photographer knew each other, there was direct engagement between them. Seldom did snapshot photographers move around a subject looking for different angles. Most snapshots were taken from eye-level, with little variation in vertical camera angle. Subjects were most often centered in the frame to ensure not cropping people awkwardly, due to the lack of viewfinder in early amateur cameras, what Greenough (2007b) calls a “hit-or-miss strategy” (159; see also Waggoner 2007). More recently, the centering of the subject was due to the auto-focus sensors of many point-and-shoot cameras being in the center of the viewfinder. Because snapshooters concentrate on their main subject, background elements were often placed haphazardly within the frame, visually competing with the subject or cropped oddly along the edges of the frame. Close ups were unusual in snapshots as amateur camera lenses required subjects to be a minimum distance away to be in focus. Due to the lenses on amateur cameras, snapshots have much of the scene in focus. Further, amateur cameras required strong light, whether from sunlight or an on-camera flash, the latter produced strong shadows directly behind subjects. In less than optimal light and without a

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flash, snapshots captured a blurred subject. The overall effect of the snapshot aesthetic is very subjective and personal, due to the strong engagement between subject and photographer and the less polished composition of the frame. What remains most important to amateur photographers is that the main subject is recognizable. Intentional artistic expression is less important. Photojournalism’s aesthetics also were highly conventional. But rather than providing a personal, engaged point of view as snapshots did, news photographs provided an independent, institutional point of view for a mass audience. There was little engagement visible between the subjects and the photographers, with subjects most often unposed, either because they were unaware they were being photographed or, if they were expecting to be photographed, indifferent or consciously trying not to appear aware. News photographers seldom centered their subjects, instead relying on compositional techniques, such as “the rule of thirds,” to compose images in a more visually interesting and dynamic manner. The rule of thirds required subdividing the camera frame with two equally spaced vertical and horizontal lines, and to place the most important subject on one of the lines or their intersections (Kobre 2008; Parrish 2002). Professional news photographers were expected to be able to manipulate two exposure variables, shutter speed and f/stop, in order to freeze or blur motion, or to increase or decrease the amount of the scene that was in focus, which is referred to as depth of field. A small f/stop number will, generally, produce a photograph with a shallow depth of field, with only the subject sharp, while the background was out of focus. Another characteristic of news photography was the use of a variety of lenses often manually focused, rather than auto-focused, in order to have greater control over the look of the final image. News photographers were expected to move around a scene in order to discover the most telling perspective. This required climbing up to look down on a subject, bending down to look up, or moving around to the side or back of a subject, rather than just shooting the subject straight on at eye-level. Awareness of the content throughout the entire frame was also an important part of the professional aesthetic, making sure elements in the background did not visually compete with those in the foreground. Further, professional news photographers preferred to only include content that enhanced the meaning they were trying to

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convey. The resulting point-of-view offered by this aesthetic was one of an objective, detached observer exploring a scene. Accompanied by headlines, captions and stories, the meaning of the photographs was constrained or anchored to specific or preferred readings (Barthes 1977). This does not mean that there was only one way to understand news photographs, but that a dominant reading was often apparent through their presentation (Hall 1973). At certain moments, the aesthetics of news photographs deviated from the controlled, polished conventional style. When photographers were in a dangerous, quickly changing news situation, and when the content was quite compelling, such as war, news organizations used photographs more haphazardly composed, including images that were poorly lit, tilted or “slightly out of focus” (the name of war photographer Robert Capa’s wartime memoir (1947/1999). As we will see with snapshot versions of news, these aesthetics emphasized the seriousness of the event, the truthfulness of the photographer’s version of it and the challenges faced by the photographer in capturing the images. Beginning in the 1950 and 1960s, many fine art and documentary photographers began to challenge the more conservative news aesthetics of the time, largely defined by newspapers and magazines such as Life, by incorporating a looser, more engaged style. Witkovsky (2007) refers to this as a “snapshot aesthetic,” which he differentiates from actual amateur snapshots, because of the intentionality of the technique. The results were a more subjective interpretation of public life. Photographers such as Robert Frank and William Klein began exploring America using a much more intimate perspective on subjects, moving in close, and playing with cropping, tilt and focus. Other photographers who followed, such as Garry Winnogrand and Diane Arbus, also incorporated elements of snapshot photography into their work, bringing a planned casualness and intimacy to public life. Greenough (2007a) stated that these artists “embraced instantaneous photography … to impart a sense of veracity and authority to their works but also to celebrate the accidental quality of both modern life and modern photography” (2). Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and other photographers documented personal moments for public consumption, recording very intimate and raw situations of sex, drug use and violence among their friends. Although these photographers incorporated aspects of personal or snapshot photography, none of their

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photographs would likely be mistaken as being produced by amateur photographers. There is intentionality to them, produced with a professional level camera, which belies any amateur status. These images were displayed either in galleries, art museums or fine art books, rather than in private photo albums. Despite these aesthetic forays into snapshot imagery, newspaper photographers seldom deviated from conventional news photography style, emphasizing aesthetic control and detachment.

Digitization Changes Everything The practices and aesthetics of both photojournalism and personal photography were established in the era of analog photography. Everything began to blur with the advent of digital photography. In 1975, Kodak engineer Steven Sasson invented the first camera able to record a very limited digital photograph (Sarvas and Frohlich 2007). It took many years, though, for a digital camera with a sensor sensitive enough for (as well as affordable for) professionals and amateurs. The first professional digital camera was released in 1991, the Nikon F3 with a DCS-100 digital sensor from Kodak (History of Kodak 1990). The first consumer digital camera, the Apple QuickTake 100, was released in 1994 (Ha 2010). Digital photography removed the costs of film and processing, freeing people to use their cameras in new ways. Digital opened up photography to more people than film cameras had and allowed people to make photographs in more varied situations, as people carried cameras with them more often (Van House 2011). Sharp released the first camera phone in 2000 in Japan, and by 2004, sales of camera phones outpaced those of stand-alone point and shoot digital cameras (Sharp History). Digital photography was supported in distribution by a number of photo sharing websites and services including Picasa (2002), Facebook and Flickr (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), Tumblr (2007), and Instagram and Hipstamatic (2010) allowing relatively easy and instantaneous circulation of photographs and videos. Whereas the film age of snapshot photography was dubbed “Kodak Culture,” this new era of camera phones has been referred to as “Nokia Culture” (Rubinstein and Sluis 2008), characterized by cameras being ubiquitous and always connected (Gye 2007; Koskinen 2005; Vincent 2006). There was no time prior where people always had a camera present (Reading 2009; Riviere 2005; Campbell and Park 2008).

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The camera phone further expanded not just who was making photographs, but also what was being photographed. As Okabe and Ito (2003) stated: “In comparison to the traditional camera, which gets trotted out for special excursions and events – noteworthy moments bracketed off from the mundane – camera phones capture the more fleeting and unexpected moments of surprise, beauty and adoration in the everyday” (see also Rubinstein and Sluis 2008; Van Dijik 2008). People posted pictures not just of their friends and family, but of almost anything they found remotely interesting. People posted pictures of themselves, taken by them, visual tidbits they discovered through the day, food they were about to eat and empty glasses from drinks they had consumed (Mendelson and Papacharissi 2011). Due to the connected nature of mobile phones (depending on the quality of service/coverage), people were able to share and receive photographs nearly instantaneously with many people, not just friends and family. As Riviere (2005) stated: “Photography thus acquires the status of an instant communication medium that is nearly synchronous as voice and text messaging” (174; see also Sarvas and Frohlich 2007; Van Dijik 2008). The camera phone and the sharing of photographs through a variety of Web sites made private moments public. No longer were snapshots viewed only in one’s home. They were posted to websites and social networks for wide consumption and comment. Due to the ease and speed of sharing photographs, snapshots have moved from a record of the past upon which to reflect, to a view of the present, as a part of an ongoing conversation with one or many. This reflects a shift in photographs from being proof that “I was there then” to a statement that “I am here now.”

Digitization and the Current News Environment Photography was not the only field affected by digitization. The arrival of digital forms of communication, including the Internet, mobile platforms and digital recording devices, coincided with, and was related to, significant changes in the journalism industry. Over the past 20 years, the circulation of both newspapers and news magazines has declined significantly, as has, more recently, newspaper and magazine advertising revenues (Edmonds et al. 2012; Matsa, Sasseen, and Mitchell 2012). Similarly, viewership for network TV news has

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declined over the past 30 years (Guskin and Rosenstiel 2012). While viewership of cable news has increased over the past decade, it has reversed over the last few, with audiences declining sharply (Holcomb, Mitchell, and Rosenstiel 2012). In addition, viewership for local TV news has declined slightly, though advertising revenues have declined sharply (Potter, Matsa, and Mitchell 2012). The result has been a significant loss of revenue for most traditional news media. Audiences have been migrating to online content, though the revenue has not followed. Online news outlets have become more popular than newspapers and radio as sources of news. Only television (both broadcast and cable) remains a more popular source of information. (Olmstead et al. 2012). The loss of revenue has led to significant cost-cutting efforts by legacy news outlets, with reductions in the number of foreign and U.S. bureaus, the amount of space dedicated to editorial content, and the number of newsworkers, including photojournalists (Edmonds et al. 2012). Cost cutting, it has been argued, has affected the quality of news content. There has been a marked increase in “event-driven” news, news that was based on a specific episode rather than coverage of trends or slower changing topics, as well as a focus on political strategy and gamesmanship over issue coverage (Bennett 2007; Jamieson and Waldman 2003). There has also been a decline in coverage of government, public affairs topics, and international news in favor of sensational and softer topics such as crime and entertainment, across all news media platforms (Bennett 2007). All of the above has led to a significant decline in the credibility and authority of journalism and journalists (Gitlin 2011), as well as an increase in negative views people hold toward the news media (Pew Research Center 2011)

Rise of Citizen (Photo-)Journalism Given the prevalence of digital communications technologies and the declining status of professional journalism, it is not surprising that amateurs have stepped into the reporting business. Digitization reduced the costs of news production, allowing individuals not employed by large media companies to report the news. Previously, amateurs were sources or audiences for large journalistic institutions, creating clear boundaries between journalists and non-journalists. These boundaries have blurred. As Kovach and Rosenstiel (2007) stated: “Technology is transforming citizens from passive consumers of news

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produced by professionals into active participants who can assemble their own journalism from disparate elements” (19; see also Ingram 2011; Whitaker 2011). In some cases, this meant additional content for traditional news outlets, in other cases it meant content that bypassed traditional news outlets altogether, presenting alternatives to mainstream news. The results are that individuals, independent of institutions, are serving as the reporters, editors and publishers of news content. The overarching term for amateur reporting is citizen journalism: “people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others” (Glaser 2006; see also Jarvis 2006). It is argued that amateurs provided citizens a more complete view of a news event by showing more slices of it, by incorporating new voices and by posting content more quickly than professional journalists (Bell 2011; Garcia-Montes, Caballero-Munoz and Perez-Alvarez 2006; Ibrahim 2007; Reading 2009). As a significant socializing and ideological institution, journalism, in ways similar to schools, churches, science and governments represents what Lyotard (1979) called metanarratives or grand narratives, those all-encompassing institutions or bodies of knowledge that define how people understand the world and truth. For Lyotard, “incredulity toward metanarratives” defines the postmodern era (xxiv). New challenges threaten the unifying view of these narratives. Throughout the twentieth century, there was little ability to challenge mainstream journalism’s point of view on the world (Conboy 2002). Technologically and logistically it was too expensive to offer alternative perspectives on the mainstream news narratives. The rise of citizen journalism has already led to the blurring of categories, including consumer and producer; citizen/journalist; participant/observer; personal/public; as well as popular/elite (or professional) standards of journalistic practice. In photography, new journalistic image providers augment, and, at times, replace, images produced by professional photojournalists. First were bystanders, citizen witnesses, who happened to be in the right place when something occurred. Images produced by bystanders, such as Abraham Zapruder, are the latest versions of amateurs, who had the only version of an important event. Due to both the ubiquity of

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camera phones and the immediate distribution they offer, amateurs witnessing events often scoop traditional news outlets. This was seen in the case of the airplane landing on the Hudson River, where an onlooker on a passing ferry posted a photo of passengers standing on the wings of the plane, while it floated on the river. Even in one of the news media capitals of the world, New York City, there was no way for journalists to cover this as quickly as this person could or did (Beaumont 2009). CNN aired blurry, shaky video footage of explosions and smoke in Homs, Syria, labelled as “Amateur Video/YouTube”. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper said this is the “reality” of what is happening there (CNN 2012). Because these images fit within standard news values of independent observations and timeliness, they are easily incorporated into mainstream journalism, despite the shakier aesthetics. The aesthetics echo the blurred images made by Robert Capa coming ashore with troops on D-Day. The less than perfect aesthetics are outweighed by the significance of the content, as well as the lack of other, more polished, versions of the events. A second category of citizen-produced news imagery is photos produced by participants in events. These images offer personal, highly subjective points of view of news events. News organizations are reticent to use content produced by actors in events, as they do not adhere to traditional news values of independence and objectivity (Kovach and Rostenstiel 2007; Tuchman 1978). Participant photos are often circulated independently of the news organizations on Facebook, YouTube or blogs, providing alternative views often sooner than traditional news outlets do. When the London subway was bombed in 2005, the first images people saw were those taken with camera phones by victims still trapped in the tunnel. According to Helen Boaden, the BBC’s director of news: “We had 50 images within an hour [of the London bombing]” (quoted in Day 2005; see also Allan 2006). Videos produced by protesters at various global economic summits, such as the G20 summits in Seattle and Pittsburgh, provided alternative views to those supplied by mainstream news outlets, which often ignored the protests or focused on the most radical protesters. Protesters throughout the Arab Spring produced their own photographic versions of events, often challenging or preempting official versions. The people who worked at Egyptian citizen journalism Website Mosireen saw themselves as journalists and activists (Marshall 2012). Likewise, much

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of the earliest coverage of Occupy Wall Street came from the participants themselves distributing images through Twitter and Facebook, as the mainstream news media were slow to recognize the news value of this story. These types of images are used by news organizations at arms length, by segregating them on “citizen journalism” websites, such as CNNs IReports. This latter method allows news organizations to benefit from the immediate, and often free, content, while keeping their institutional and objective authority untainted. Most recently, the Associated Press signed an agreement with citizen journalism site Bambuser for access to its amateur content. As one technology journalist stated: Overall, this seems like a win-win for all parties concerned. AP gets more extensive access to user-generated content, which it will certainly make some money from as it sells on to other outlets, whilst Bambuser gets great exposure AND a big client in the process. Finally, users get the chance to have their content shared with millions, so as long as you’re happy not making a bean from your video, then everyone’s happy (Sawers 2012).

The last category of images is related to participant images, but is better classified as perpetrator-produced images, photographs produced by those in power perpetrating violence on less powerful individuals. This was seen in the Abu Ghraib photos, produced by U.S. soldiers torturing or degradingly posing Iraqi prisoners, and later, the footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution taken by his guards there to execute him. As Helmore (2007) stated: “The release of videophone footage on the internet showing Saddam being mocked and humiliated in his final moments by guards chanting the name of the Shia clear Moqtada al-Sadr reconfirmed that the mainstream media has all but lost control of what reaches the public domain.” In 2005, a guard using a cell phone secretly videotaped an arrested Malaysian woman, as she was stripped and tortured by other guards ( Jordan 2006). In many cases, these images were not meant for wider circulation, but once out, they serve as powerful sources of critique against government practices or policies. It is not just dramatic breaking news events that are covered by citizens. Many national and local news organizations seek photographs from people about everyday activities as a way of engaging with their

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audiences. For example, people are asked for photographs of Fourth of July celebrations or Christmas decorations, of a heavy snowfall or summer fun during a heat wave. All of these types of amateur photographs reflect a more subjective and engaged aesthetic than that of professional news photographs. It is this more personal point of view that competes with traditional journalistic views for control of truth.

Reading the Aesthetics of Camera Phone Photographs The aesthetics traditionally associated with snapshots are becoming the common vehicle for interpreting news events. It is the style of camera phone images, the grainy, poorly lit, haphazardly framed look that first set them apart from those produced by photojournalists. The aesthetics convey a sense that a viewer is seeing a scene directly, rather than a representation of a scene and suggest little artistic planning or thought, and thus, little sense of intentional distortion (David 2010; Hjorth 2006; Rubinstein 2005; Rubinstein and Sluis 2008). Discussing the rise of amateur imagery on TV, Dovey (2000) stated: “First of all, the low grade video image has become the privileged form of TV ‘truth telling’, signifying authenticity and an indexical reproduction of the real world” (55). He continued (when discussing the TV program Funniest Home Videos): “authenticity is guaranteed by the appearance of being happenstance ‘accidental’ recordings” (58). He saw the “amateurishness [of these home videos] as [a] guarantor of truth” (64). Similarly, amateur camera phone images of news convey an innocence of seeing, offering a sense that these scenes actually could be taken by anyone, appearing, as Rubinstein and Sluis (2008) argued, to be “authorless” (22). Camera phone images are more real and less transformed versions of reality than the versions of reality produced by professional news photographers. All photos appear, when compared to other representational art forms like painting and sculpture, to be produced mechanically (or now digitally) without human interference, what Barthes (1977) called “the myth of photographic ‘naturalness’” (44). In trying to understand the unique nature of photographs, Barthes (1981) argued that “a photograph [unlike other representation art forms] is always invisible: it is not it that we see” (6). People see the thing itself portrayed, not a

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representation of it. All photographs provide evidence that the subject existed, what Barthes referred to as the “that-has-been” quality of photographs (77). Still, photographs are more than just a window through which viewers see the referent unmediated. Barthes (1977) distinguished between two levels of meaning or types of messages contained in photographs. The first level, the denotative, referred to the thing itself, the content of the photograph. The second level, the connotative, referred to the cultural meaning of the content, as well as the way the content is portrayed through stylistic choices. The connotative level inflects the referent with an interpretative overlay. It is this second level of meaning that truly distinguishes snapshot versions of news from those of professional photographers. As Barthes (1977) argued, “the press photograph is an object that has been worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated according to professional, aesthetic or ideological norms which hare so many factors of connotation” (19). Professional artists, including news photographers, by definition, take control of their medium, demonstrating what Gross (1973) called symbolic competence, in how they choose the subjects, and, more importantly to this chapter, the style by which the subject is portrayed. As Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Damon Winter (2011) said (in discussing his Hipstamatic photos from U.S. troops in Afghanistan): Any discussion about the validity of these images comes down to two basic fundamentals: aesthetics and content … We are being naïve if we think aesthetics do not play an important role in the way photojournalists tell a story. We are not walking photocopiers. We are storytellers. We observe, we chose moments, we frame little slices of our world with our viewfinders, we even decide how much or how little light will illuminate our subjects, and – yes – we choose what equipment to use. Through all of these decisions, we shape the way a story is told.

Snapshots are not likely to be thought of as having been intentionally “worked on.” While there are conventional aesthetics of snapshots, there are fewer actual or perceived stylistic choices. The two different aesthetics cue different cultural notions of reality – one loaded with the institutional and hegemonic significance of a grand narrative and the other with the veneer of personal mementos. The perceived intentionality of the aesthetics suggests how people read the different versions of the news. Worth and Gross (1981)

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discussed interpretative strategies people utilize to understand what they called sign events, situations that occur for which they must determine the meaning. Worth and Gross (1981) define a continuum of events from natural to symbolic. Natural or existential events are situations people recognize as having “no symbolic meaning” beyond the denotative or beyond mere existence (135). Viewers presume that there was no intent to convey a deeper meaning. As the authors argued: “If we assess [the sign-events] to be natural, we may do no more than tacitly note their existence … We may further attribute to them stable, transient, or situational characteristics” (136-7). The content of natural sign events just exists with no latent meaning. The viewer limits their processing of the event to “what is there?” The other end of the continuum is made up of events, which were seen as symbolic. People approached these events by trying to understand what the subject’s portrayal means or what the producer of the sign event was trying to communicate through the aesthetic rendering of the situation and the choices of subject matter. Worth and Gross (1981) said: “If, on the other hand, we assess them as symbolic, we consciously or tacitly assume implicative intent and call into play those interpretive strategies by which we infer meaning form communicative events” (136-37). People see these sign events as something to be probed for deeper meaning. Viewers ask of these events “why are the subjects portrayed as they are?” and “what does this portrayal mean?” The lack of intentional “working on” places snapshots toward the natural end of Worth and Gross’s continuum. From experience, people focus on who or what is there in snapshots. People see their family members, their friends, the sites they have visited. Compared to professional images, which users rightly expect to be produced with intentionality in order to capture the essence of an event, cued by the polished nature of the aesthetics and composition, camera phone images demonstrate spontaneous recordings of what happened before the user. People are less likely to ascribe intention or mediation, and thus may not ask additional questions beyond what is there. Snapshots thus have an enhanced sense in “That has been” serving as better proof that we are seeing the true event. People see only the subject, ignoring the producer, through the veneer of innocence the aesthetics present. This reading of Barthes and Worth and Gross separates the two aesthetics of photojournalism and snapshots into distinct groups. On the professional photojournalism side, the aesthetics are associated

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with words such as controlled, intentional and decisive. We can add transformed, constructed, connotative and symbolic to the concepts discussed above. On the snapshot side, the aesthetics are associated with words such as haphazard, unintentional, and indecisive, as well as found, authentic, denotative, and natural. The aesthetics of each of these types of photographs make different claims to truth. The professional aesthetics argue for Truth with a capital T, which is an official version of the events. The snapshot version, however, argues for a more personal truth similar to the truth we hear when a friend relays an anecdote.

Conclusion As the Szarkowski quote at the beginning of the chapter explained, reporting capabilities have changed the nature of news. Amateur photographers wielding camera phones and drawing on the aesthetics of snapshots, have changed our conception of journalistic truth. The unskilled, poorly composed pictures are the new sign of authoritativeness of news. Amateur photographers are the new truth-tellers, speaking to and for power, through the authority of a vernacular or naïve aesthetic. Most amateur photographers, while skilled in basic recording of people, are not skilled (or able, due to the camera limitations) in manipulating the various aesthetic tools in the professional photographer’s arsenal in order to alter and enhance the perceived meaning of the subject. Amateurs only have a limited ability to read and write photographically (Messaris 1994). They lack (or people perceive them to lack due the aesthetics of snapshots) the fluency to manipulate a scene before them. Amateurs seldom shoot from angles other than eye-level and straight on; they seldom can or try to adjust depth of field rendering parts of scene out of focus. The resulting pictures, reflecting a limited stylistic vocabulary, suggest that the scene was not willfully manipulated. The images are rendered purely denotative; they just appear as viewers see them. Camera phone photographs of news events return to notions that a camera, without human action, produces photographs. The maker becomes invisible through the aesthetics of snapshot photography. The awareness of that a photograph is made by a human observer, cued by professional news aesthetics, calls into question the view. Still, these snapshots aesthetics cloud many questions: Who was the producer? For what reason were the photographs produced? What

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was not being photographed? This innocent style can be co-opted by those skilled in ways similar to the street photographers of the 1950s and 1960s. A snapshot style can be utilized as a vernacular language such as a working class dialect or accent is used by a skilled actor to convince viewers of the authenticity of the view before them. Already there are television commercials that look as if amateurs who do not know how to control the settings of a video camera nor stabilize the camera shot them. This examination raises tensions beyond aesthetics to journalistic authority. Notions of verification and authenticity are bound up in the aesthetics of news photographs. Camera phone photography may mark the end of journalistic control over narratives of the news, where the imprimatur of a photojournalist was needed to establish visual truth. This journalistic truth was embedded into the institutional gravitas of news brands such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, the Associated Press, CNN and ABC News. In this era of digital photography, this may no longer be the case or even desired. The formerly objective is now seen as too subjective, too constructed, too laden with artistic manipulation. In essence, professional images have too much connotation. As Greenough (2007b) argued, snapshots present an “unassailable and profound” truth, something with which journalistic institutions and professional photojournalists are just beginning to come to terms (152).

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“It’s Just a Joke” Humor and Social Identity in Forwarded E-mail Images of Obama

Margaret Duffy, Janis Teruggi Page, & Rachel Young

T

oday’s Internet allows likeminded individuals to keep in touch with each other and to be supported and reinforced in their belief systems. E-mail, social networking sites, and affinity sites offer opportunities for those who are geographically distant to connect and share advice, articles, and very frequently, jokes and cartoons. While much of the humorous material is innocuous or puerile, some of it is related to political figures and ideas. This chapter argues that “humorous” content forwarded among members of a group can be a unique type of political discourse that functions to create community, develop a group social identity, and cast Barack Obama as the “other” with racially charged images and cartoons. Moreover, these images and e-mails employ similar strategies as those employed by white supremacist hate group Web sites such as Stormfront (Meddaugh and Kay 2009). To understand how the senders might constitute social identity by forwarding the e-mails, we looked at the rhetoric of the images, asking how they worked as a visually coded language and what their meanings proposed about the users. We suggest that use of humor connected with common cultural references is a form of electronic jujitsu that seeks to evade the accusation of racism in that the e-mailed image is

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“just a joke.” This is an aspect of the process of visual appropriation that proposes humor through the addition, suppression, exchange or substitution of elements in an image. Our methodology analyzes the images using Jacques Durand’s (1970/1983, 34) visual rhetoric matrix in order to assess the power of the rhetoric, its messaging, and its potential to build an online community. Visuals are rhetorical in that they influence thoughts and action (Zakia 2007, 317) with propositional elements. Durand’s matrix suggests how variations in composition work to shape an image’s meaning in particular directions. This scholarship and a previous study emerged from scores of rightwing forwarded e-mails received by one of the researchers (Duffy, Page and Young 2012). The earlier study focused on a range of messages that pointed out Obama’s gaffes, questioned his legitimacy as president, accused him of hating white people, claimed he was planning to turn the U. S. into a socialist nation, and framed him as stupid and incompetent. Many of the forwards were subtly or blatantly racist and many used altered images that were photoshopped. Some of the altered images made no attempt to present a believable scenario, such as portraying Obama as the wicked witch of the west in The Wizard of Oz or as an African witch doctor. Others took more subtle approaches such as showing Mr. and Mrs. Obama using their left hands rather than right during the Pledge of Allegiance or National Anthem. Some were fairly crude while others showed considerable sophistication and skill in image manipulation. For viewers who were predisposed to dislike Obama and liberals, the images were likely to be quite believable or meaningful. For purposes of this study, we selected artifacts based on four criteria: 1) the artifacts were focused on representations of Obama that reflected racial stereotypes for African Americans, particularly African American males; 2) the artifacts were sent to the researchers in forwarded e-mails; 3) the artifacts were intended as humorous; 4) the artifacts were primarily image- rather than text-based. Images pervade today’s media culture and offer persuasive elements beyond that in text-based discourse (Foss 2005, 143). This study sought to answer the following research questions. What are the rhetorical strategies deployed in the forwarded images? How do common cultural references function in constructing the worldview presented in the e-mails? Is there a relationship between the rhetoric of well-known hate group sites such as Stormfront and the rhetorical

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strategies in the forwarded e-mails? How does humor play into this type of rhetoric? And finally, how do the e-mailed images define the social identity of the forwarders and cast Obama as “the other?”

Popular Culture Heuristics in Visual Rhetoric Visual appropriation is the rhetorical action of taking over the meaning of something that is already known by way of visual reference. Because culturally shared symbols do not require explanation, they can be used as heuristics in visual communication. Allusions to contemporary or well-known popular arts and mass media offer readers easy understanding of the messages in images. Visual appropriations fill our everyday lives, with fashion ads, brand logos, and packaging borrowing references to quickly establish a recognizable trait or value. In this analysis, we focus on the appropriation of culturally meaningful material in political visual images. Cultural references not only facilitate but influence audience understanding. For example, the “1984” Macintosh ad used familiar cultural themes referencing Orwellian totalitarianism, films, and biblical legends to rhetorically construct its audiences (Stein 2002, 182-88). The Rosenthal flag-raising-at-Iwo-Jima image has been widely appropriated to function ideographically (Edwards and Winkler 1997, 302-06). The ideograph, developed by McGee (1980, 16) is a culturally resonant word or phrase such as “liberty” that serves to create ideologically based communities and inhibit clear thinking. Edwards and Winkler extend this notion to images that they argue can be appropriated and manipulated for parody or other goals. According to Charland (1987), who built on Burke’s proposal to use “identification” rather than “persuasion” to explain how audiences become subjects through identifying with a text’s proposition, audiences undergo a transformation of social identity through a text’s rhetorical construction. In this study of racism in anti-Obama images, rather than transforming a social identity that is largely already established, the e-mail forwarders are reinforcing their beliefs and social identity, often in emotionally charged ways. Research on mass mediated political cartoons dealing with U.S. presidential campaigns (Edwards 2001; Connors 2005), responses to Hurricane Katrina (Kelley-Romano and Westgate 2007), war

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(Cooper 2009), and gender (Halbert 2006) reveal they condense the public discourse, convey complex propositions, and often rely on cultural insinuation to parody, satirize, and/or stereotype. This reliance on cultural references agrees with Medhurst and DeSousa (1981), whose analysis of 749 political caricatures revealed literary/cultural allusions as major inventional topoi (236) calling viewers to respond with certain values, beliefs, and predispositions. Photo editing software and Internet access make it relatively simple to appropriate and transmit symbolic images. The perceived potency of negative and culturally resonant images was highlighted when the Web site Politico reported that a fund raising meeting of the Republican National Committee included a PowerPoint presentation with a slide entitled “The Evil Empire,” featuring images such as a racially charged caricature of Obama as “The Joker” in Batman, Nancy Pelosi as “Cruella DeVille,” and Harry Reid as “Scooby-Doo” (Gerstein 2010; Smith 2010).

Humor, Values, and Morals in Forwarded E-mails Almost everyone with an Internet connection receives e-mails and many of them feature humorous content usually sent by known others – friends, coworkers, and relatives. An interesting aspect of forwarded e-mails is their frequently mysterious origins and their malleability of content. Forwarded e-mail authorship is rarely revealed. People’s networks of contacts also make it difficult to discern origins, according to Joseph Phelps and colleagues (2004, 342). In their analysis of forwarded messages, they identified three send-and-receive cycles and twenty-six e-mail addresses associated with each message. Moreover, emotional responses to pass-along e-mails were positive (someone is thinking about me) and almost half of the analyzed e-mails were jokes with entertainment and fun as motivations for forwarding. Of these e-mailed jokes, about 45 percent were in current events or political categories. The authors concluded that messages most likely to be forwarded should call on emotions – “humor, fear, sadness, or inspiration,” (Phelps et al. 2004, 345). We suggest that messages that spark contempt or indignation would appear to be powerful as well. Other literature reveals that pass-along e-mails are important media for partisan political messages. Hayes’ report (2007) on right wing

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e-mail forwards revealed that some appeared to originate from a conservative publisher, but many had murky origins and appeared to undergo some changes or alterations. The majority of the e-mails were focused on personal attacks on liberals rather than policy discussions. Hayes notes that derogatory e-mails are often recycled, pointing out that e-mails forwarded during the 2000 presidential election were forwarded again in 2004 with only the candidate’s name changed from Gore to Kerry. In some cases, right wing e-mails gained the attention of the mainstream media and resulted in coverage of the so-called birther movement that questions Obama’s birthplace. Although press coverage debunked the story, many right wing e-mail devotees who distrust the so-called “elite” media often place more trust in the Internet stories they share with friends. So-called “mythbusters” such as Snopes.com, FactCheck.com, and others have followed partisan e-mails and found while their origins are unclear, almost all of the negative e-mail chains were aimed at liberals or Democrats and that “of the 79 chain e-mails about national politics deemed false by PolitiFact since 2007, only four were aimed at Republicans” (Farhi 2011). Marketing researchers, not surprisingly, are very interested in what motivates forwards and viral e-mails. People are more likely to forward a message from someone close and known rather than from an unknown or commercial source (Chiu et al. 2007, 529). An e-mail from a friend or colleague has more credibility than a commercial source since it is not likely to be motivated by personal gain. The concept of “tie strength” from marketing research is also useful for understanding motivations. This term refers to the perceived closeness of the sender and receiver (Bansal and Voyer 2000, 169). The same relationship impact may apply to political e-mails sent from one member of a social network to another who will likely feel confident that the message, humor, and worldview in the content are concordant with his or her own. Across media platforms, humor often carries the weight of values and morals according to many scholars and observers. Kramer (2011) suggests the notion of “humor ideologies” that “guide speakers in their production and consumption of humor” (138). In her discussion about Internet sexual assault jokes, Kramer draws the distinction between the act of rape and the joke about rape and that there are individuals who tell/appreciate these kinds of jokes and those who deplore them. She argues that people believe certain types of humor and jokes carry moral weight because people believe they do (161). This may seem as

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if she is stating the obvious, but the very dissemination of such materials may confer credibility. By extension, those passing along racist humor differentiate themselves as people who, in their view, are not racist but are part of an in-group of people who understand this type of humor. Jokes about the space shuttle Challenger disaster, 9/11, or Princess Diana’s death exhibit a common element of humor: script incompatibility (Kuipers 2005, 71) or what Oring (1987) called “appropriate incongruity” (277). Such humor juxtaposes socially determined dichotomies such as real and unreal, taboo and non-taboo, innocent and devious (Kuipers 2005, 71). The humor derives from the friction generated by an inappropriate pairing, and many jokes use the lingo and jingles of television commercials or popular culture. To find the humor in a mash-up of two incongruous domains, the audience must have familiarity with the domains being juxtaposed, as well any shared interpretations and cultural touchstones invoked in the joke’s content. The Obama images in this study use a range of actions that modify visual elements to create the friction leading to humor. Jokes about media-identified national tragedies mirror the incongruity of commercial mass media, in which advertisements are juxtaposed with news in a mash-up of the trivial and the serious (Smyth 1986, 259). That mash-up is most striking in the digitally altered photographs that are the subject of this study. Frank (2004) explored the “photoshops” that circulated by e-mail after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Images classified by Frank as the news-lore of vengeance visually humiliate bin Laden via military, sexual, or scatological means and juxtaposed this hostile “other” with American national or cultural symbols, such as the State of Liberty and Mickey Mouse (634).

Social Identity Theory Social identity theory posits that an individual’s belief and awareness that he or she is part of a group or collective with certain attitudes and values is a psychological state that is crucial to the individual’s sense of self and identity (Turner 1982, 16). This concept is prominently seen in studies involving minority populations (Tajfel 1982, 486). Turner (1982) defines a social group as “two or more individuals who share a common social identification of themselves and, which is nearly the same thing, perceive themselves to be members of the same social

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category” (15). Importantly this is different from assigning people to a category based on certain attributes or characteristics. Rather, individuals define themselves in large part by belonging to groups large and small. For example, Greene (2004, 137) applied social identity theory to better understand how political beliefs are formed and maintained. He suggests that identification with and favoritism towards one’s own group and corresponding derogation of out-groups not only affects attitudes but partisan behaviors. Similarly, research by Richardson (2005, 508), and Christensen and colleagues (2004,1305) examined the conflict between in-groups and out-groups based on group identity. Thorson, Fung, and Vraga (2008, 9) examined uncivil partisan blogging finding that denigration of the out-group drew greater emotional response and enhanced affiliation among out-group members. Forwarded partisan e-mails psychologically function to heighten the in-group’s members’ positive beliefs about their own groups and amplify the differences and perceived negatives of the out-group.

Stereotypes and Social Identity on the Web We have in the past argued that forwarded e-mails are a form of digital folklore (Duffy, Page and Young 2012), and the Web is particularly suited to the anonymous transmission of materials. Specifically, the relaxation of authorship identification and discourse categories on the Internet allows the propagation of opinion cloaked as fact as well as the forwarding of potentially controversial materials without explicit endorsement. We contend that one function of the images in these forwarded e-mails is to re-affirm racist stereotypes about African Americans and notions of white superiority that were challenged by the election of a black president. Far from being “just for fun,” the racist stereotypes presented in these e-mails operate on a rhetorical continuum with the hate speech that also flourishes online. We consider the history and use of the term “stereotype,” explore its function in social life, and discuss the Internet as an environment for the fomentation of racist rhetoric. The journalist Walter Lippmann (1922) was the first to use the term stereotypes as a metaphor for attitudes formed about people without specific knowledge. Lippmann identified several characteristics of

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stereotypes and also offered an explanation of their utility. As attitudes, stereotypes are formed in the absence of actual evidence; they are “obdurate to education or criticism” (98, 99). They are the product not of individual experience, but instead are cultural byproducts, propagated by the mass media as a way to render complicated realities more unidimensional and digestible. Stereotypes allow us to have expectations about others based on categorization. As predictive judgments, they offer the comfort of what is familiar and expected; they “fit as snugly as an old shoe” (95). Experiences that do not conform to stereotypes challenge our expectations and threaten to expose our worldview as an interpretation and not objective fact. Since Lippmann established the term as a metaphor, scholars in social psychology have continued to define stereotypes as a subset of the mental formations called attitudes, and to examine their functions for individuals and society. In general, attitudes are judgments about the world, and as judgments they have valence. An attitude can be uniformly negative, positive, or a combination of both, and of varying strength (Maio and Haddock 2007, 567. Since Lippmann’s coinage, the term stereotype has gained a valence of its own. Rather than neutral heuristics that simplify analysis of a complex world, the term stereotype is now used as equivalent to prejudice, a negative prejudgment based on categorization rather than direct experience. Stereotypes are thus judgments about people based on categorization, specifically categorization as different, or other, than the reference group. Binary oppositions, such as the division of people into two distinct groups, are hierarchical (Ferber 1998, 23). One group is on top, and the other, on the bottom. A result of our instinctual categorization of people into in-groups, or self, and out-groups, or other, is favorable evaluation of the in-group, and prejudice against the out-group (Brewer 2007, 695). This differentiation is a function of our innate desire to see ourselves, and the groups that constitute our social identity, in a favorable light (Tafjel and Turner 1986, 9). Stereotypes refer to attitudes about groups external to one’s own social identity. In other words, stereotypes are attitudes about the other. Defining a group as other positions that group as less than the in-group – less powerful, less able, or less worthy. Said (1978, 48) defines othering as an act of depicting the frailties and inferiorities of a marginalized group to emphasize the strength and superiority of the group in power in the context of the West’s relationship with

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developing countries. Othering is not just a function of explicit racism but is also evident in mainstream media products, such as the coverage of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (Brennen and Duffy 2003). Stereotypes emphasize the uniform inferiority, and thus the otherness, of an out-group. Stereotypes of the other may be invoked as restorative when the power of a group is threatened or when economic or social anxieties are high. For example, Meddaugh and Kay (2009, 256) categorize depictions of the other on the white supremacist Stormfront Web site. The out-groups, specifically African Americans and Jews, are described as bearing responsibility for all social ills; using manipulation to alter society; and seeking the destruction of whites. These characterizations of the other as diabolical and destructive contrast with an additional definition of the other as fundamentally inferior, physically and intellectually. These dual traits of criminality and bumbling idiocy are represented in well-worn cultural stereotypes of African Americans as dangerous gangsters and as rightfully enslaved. While few people who forward e-mails depicting President Obama as a diamond-toothed pimp would self-identify as white supremacist, we argue that the stereotypes depicted in these images exist on a continuum bridging slave caricatures with the explicitly violent and genocidal rhetoric of contemporary hate groups. In Duffy’s (2003) analysis of hate group Web sites, she identifies a rhetorical vision that unites members of the in-group as superior and even chosen by God. This vision of superiority is maintained primarily through demonization of the out-group. While the rhetoric of the hate group sites in Duffy’s analysis is dead serious, the message of out-group inferiority is a more strident version of the “harmless” stereotypes and jokes of the forwarded e-mails. The Internet extends the reach of groups beyond geographical boundaries. Now, a group bound by a shared ideology can commune virtually online. In addition, the intertextual nature of the Web means that traditional cues to information credibility are often unavailable. On the Web, the legitimization of racist rhetoric is “enabled by the collapse of discourse genres” (Meddaugh and Kay 2009, 253). Web sites can create a pastiche of sources, veil authorship to lend legitimacy, or cite a legacy media outlet to lend credibility to a flawed argument. On the Stormfront Web site, one author extensively cites a Wall Street Journal article; while the recognizable name of a mainstream

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media outlet may lend credibility, a half-sentence of the original article on minority hiring was twisted and then inflated to bolster an argument that whites suffer because of preferential hiring policies toward minorities (Meddaugh and Kay 2009, 257). Other techniques used to legitimize racist rhetoric by co-opting credible sources include citing an outdated version of the Encyclopedia Britannica to support the idea of white superiority (Meddaugh and Kay 2009, 261). These are examples of what Meddaugh and Kay call “reasonable racism” (254). This racist rhetoric is not baldly violent and inflammatory. Instead, it adopts the tone of an objective news story, citing pseudoscience or twisting conclusions to argue for the scientific fact of white supremacy. If the evidence supports the racist conclusion, then the racism is reasonable. This pseudo-intellectual conceit of evidence for racial difference is similar to other right-wing challenges to fact-based reality (Rich 2006, 3), in which knowledge that is inconvenient is denied, such as with the promotion of intelligent design as a scientifically reasonable alternative to the theory of evolution. The Web also allows racist groups to obscure bias by failing to fully disclose their views and history. Cloaked Websites are an extreme example of veiled authorship on the Web. On cloaked sites, authorship is purposefully concealed to obscure a political agenda (Daniels 2009, 118). One site claiming to be soliciting donations for the victims of Hurricane Katrina was actually registered to a white supremacist. Another site, operated by the publisher of Stormfront, purports to be a biographical site about Martin Luther King Jr., yet the focus is on exposing his supposed infidelity, thereby delegitimizing the heroic civil rights leader (http://www.martinlutherking.org/). Both sites capitalize on a lack of media literacy and skills for determining the actual source of information on a Web site and its legitimacy. The scientific evidence presented by Stormfront and the veiled authorship of cloaked Web sites are attempts to legitimize racist discourse and to make racist stereotypes more reasonable. We argue that the forwarded images discussed in this article similarly use the anonymous forwarding capability of e-mail to veil intent and also employ humor to render racist stereotypes about African Americans, in the person of President Obama, more palatable and more socially acceptable.

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Methodology and Analysis The twelve visual images in this article, all illustrations of racial stereotyping, are drawn from a database of fifty-six images disparaging Barack Obama that were received by one of the authors via forwarded e-mails. These e-mails were circulated among 16 geographically dispersed individuals. The author personally knows only three of the individuals on the e-mail list. The known individuals are white, wealthy and college educated. None of the participants questioned the veracity or accuracy of the contents during the time they were collected from May 22, 2009 to March 9, 2010. The authors supplemented their collected e-mails by accessing myrightwingdad.blogspot.com/, an archive of right-wing forwarded e-mails, for images appearing between January 2009 and May 2009, in order to begin their analysis from the time Obama took office. All of the images studied here are available on this Web site as well as via search. Guided by Durand’s (1970/1983) visual rhetoric matrix, popular culture references, and past scholarship on racial stereotyping, we identify how the images’ visual constructions operate to forcefully propose meaning. To analyze the syntax of each image we applied the rhetorical matrix (Table 1), which suggests how the operations of addition, suppression, substitution, and exchange work to shape an image’s meaning in particular directions. In any of these operations, Durand determined that five elements could be used to alter an image’s message in a certain way: elements that are identical, similar, different, opposing, or ambiguous/paradoxical. To understand the rhetorical propositions in these images, we identified the graphic operations and then determined which elements were used. Some images fall clearly into one category while others are more complex. As we detail our findings, we explain more clearly through the examples. Born during American slavery, stereotypes associated the African American with sexual preoccupation, dim-wittedness, profanity, broken grammar, unemployment, and criminality. Our analysis identified stereotypes depicted in the time period 2009-2011 that disturbingly echoed those of much earlier times. In 1990, National Opinion Research Center (NORC) found that the majority of the U.S. population overwhelmingly understood blacks in unflattering terms: 77 percent of whites still held negative stereotypes (laziness, preference for welfare, prone to crime, etc.) about African Americans (MacDonald

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2009). Two decades later, NORC’s 2010 General Social Survey found that tolerance for racist expression in the U.S. had remained about the same since 1977 (UPI 2011). With great discomfort we set forth to critically analyze these current images, finding that the stereotypes not only reiterate the inferior, tyrannical and manipulator depictions found on hate sites like Stormfront, but also still “fit as snug as an old shoe,” (Lippmann 1922, 95) because they echo centuries-old and familiar African American stereotype categories of coon, animal, brute and Tom.

The Coon Stereotype The coon caricature, an abbreviation of raccoon originating during American slavery, is dehumanizing. The coon portrayed African American men as lazy, easily frightened, chronically idle, ignorant and inarticulate buffoons (Pilgrim 2000b). Some American films framed

Figure 1

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African Americans as unreliable, crazy, and good for nothing more than eating watermelons, stealing chickens, shooting craps, or butchering the English language (Bogle 1973/1994, 8). By forwarding images suggesting the coon caricature, the e-mail senders defined Obama as “other” by depicting him as less powerful, less able, less worthy. Figure 1, “U.S. Economy,” features a line chart spiraling downward with Obama as Steve Urkel, the fumbling pest in the television comedy show Family Matters, speaking the character’s customary line, “Did I do that?” In popular culture, the Urkel character is iconic for buffoonery. This rhetorical strategy of substituting Obama for Urkel suggests similarity, transferring the TV character’s culturally known traits of stupidity and clumsiness to Obama while also framing the national financial situation as a comedic prank. The information graphic of the U.S. economy visually co-opts a format that commonly communicates credible, fact-based statistics. The “U.S. Economy” image can also be considered an example of “reasonable racism,” in that the issue of a down economy is a real one, so coupling that truism with a racist caricature attempts to legitimate it. Sometimes various cultural allusions are compressed into a single image, requiring the receiver to unpack multiple meanings. Earlier studies have documented the message density that may resonate in popular communication due to condensed public discourse, familiar cultural allusions, and complex and subversive propositions. This study’s images correspond to Oring’s (1987) discussion on incongruous domains that call upon complex yet intuitive understandings within a community (287). For example, the “Marine Corps” image (Figure 2) is a transparent depiction of binary opposites showing a drill sergeant lecturing a humbled Obama. It conveys the role reversal of a powerless and emasculated commander-in-chief, racial tension in that the sergeant is white, the strong symbolic meaning carried by the “Marine Corps” name while Obama is nameless and represents countless boot camp comedies and dramas. It is also a stab at Obama’s intelligence and credibility with an allusion to his mispronunciation of “corps”. The president appears downcast, quiet, and passive in civilian dress, confronted by the uniformed military officer – standing in for the sender/receiver – openly and aggressively berating him. As an ideograph, the Marine uniform communicates power and authority, lending legitimacy to the proposition as a “reasonable” conclusion, similar to Stormfront’s use of the Wall Street Journal to cloak flawed

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arguments with credibility. The rhetorical strategy of opposition, juxtaposing the two contrasting figures, creates the incongruity that sparks humor to make the image more socially palatable. Contributing to the density of meaning in this visual, the two images photoshopped together lends a proposition of authenticity to the message. The connecting of African Americans to watermelon has traditionally been done in a way to dehumanize them and subject them to ridicule. Beginning with caricatures in the earliest days of plantation slavery, the image of black people eating watermelon has evolved as an image depicting the race as inferior, lazy, simple-minded, and interested only in such mindless pleasures as a slice of sweet watermelon

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(Woods 2011). “What happened to the Rose Garden?” (Figure 3) features a field of watermelons in front of the White House. The rhetorical action is one of exchange to suggest similarity: concrete objects (watermelons by the White House) give meaning to an abstract idea (Obama dehumanized and his administration ridiculed by all the negative attributes of the “coon”). By manipulating a photographic image of the White House, again the suggestion of message legitimacy – not literally, but figuratively – resonates. Figure 3

The Animal Stereotype

Visual representations stereotyping African Americans have attempted to dehumanize them by equating them with animals. In part, this was accomplished by arguing that African Americans were sub-humans: intellectually inferior, culturally stunted, morally underdeveloped, and animal-like sexually. Figures 4 through 6 signify messages about Obama’s heritage, specifically locating him not just as other, but as animal-like. These heritage myths are particularly meaningful in light of the highly publicized conspiracy questioning his U.S. citizenship, proposing his birthplace was Africa, not Hawaii, and suggesting he was ineligible to be president. The image “Now you

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know why – No birth certificate!” (Figure 4) employs a rhetorical operation of addition, communicating both a gestalt and cultural meaning. The gestalt grouping principles of similarity and proximity are propositional. This composition clusters together similar elements to encourage the viewer to see them as belonging as a unit. Their proximity reinforces this unity. The repetition of the chimpanzees is an explicit comparison – a suggested male and female chimpanzee, and a child chimpanzee with Obama’s face. The similarity of the three figures conveys agreement of animal traits. There is no mistaking the Figure 4

simile. Culturally, the figure signifies a family. Considering our thesis that the individuals sharing these images constitute themselves socially through their e-mail forwards that “other” Obama, the yardstick of this chimpanzee portrait suggests a vast physical and intellectual gulf. The forwarded e-mail “History Corrected” (Figure 5) features a supposedly unaltered photographic image of former first lady Grace Coolidge holding a raccoon. The accompanying caption reads, “Proof that Barack Obama is not the first coon in the White House.” A rhetorical operation of exchange, this e-mail uses a concrete object, a raccoon, to give meaning to the abstract idea of Obama as sub-human

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Figure 5

and also evokes the highly derogatory racial stereotypes associated with the coon caricature. Figure 6, “A Mother’s Love,” also communicates the racist rhetoric of questionable heritage through an animal reference. Here the operation is one of suppression, a suggestion of difference by holding back concrete resolution, hovering around meaning so that the viewer is forced to enter into the image to draw conclusions. This image appears seemingly benign, presenting the silhouettes of a young mother and her son in an idealized scene of a sun setting on water. Yet the caption Figure 6

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carries metonymic meaning, “A little boy says to his mother, ‘Mommy, how come I’m black and you’re white?’ His mother replied, ‘Don’t even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you’re lucky you don’t bark!’” The metonym “bark” is an attribute standing for the thing itself, suggesting bestiality.

The Brute Stereotype Hollywood films depicting poisonous, despicable, and sadistic African American pimps have fueled a stereotype that African American men are associated with crime and are prone to brutish behavior. The brute caricature traditionally depicts African American men as angry, physically strong, animalistic, and wantonly violent (Pilgrim 2000a). Figure 7, “The New White House Puppy,” is an act of substitution with difference: the Obama family’s Portuguese Water Dog has become a Pit Bull, the Figure 7 dog sometimes associated with pimps, perverting the meaning of a family pet into a sinister thug. The diamond tooth, a metonym, alludes to a black street gangster. The image works on another level of substitution, proposing a similarity between the “gangsta” dog and the rule of the White House. In “Two Brothers” (Figure 8), both gestalt and cultural meanings are combined. An operation of similarity, Obama is juxtaposed with the golf celebrity Tiger Woods, notorious for extramarital sexual affairs. While not identical, this likening and proximity of the elements suggests some unity in agreement. The caption, “Seriously…I have screwed more people than you,” builds a bridge connecting the two men as sharing a double standard. They present themselves as respectable leaders, but in truth are brutish violators of the people’s trust. They are in reality “two (black) brothers,” alike in their racially

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stereotyped immoral behaviors; Woods for acts that harmed his family and fans, Obama for policies harming the nation.

Figure 8 “Best Poster of the Year/Formal Dinner at the White House” (Figure 9), depicts an operation of substitution: Mr. and Mrs. Obama appear similar to a pimp and prostitute through mimicking their appearances. This suggestion carries the associative traits of being manipulative, criminal, destructive, and immoral. As impersonation is typically humorous, we imagine this image as a visual joke. While their costumes have been photoshopped, the unaltered male figure in formal attire between them works to position them as ludicrous and essentially out of place, creating the incongruity needed for some visual jokes. “Birth Certificates” (Figure 10), uses the rhetorical operation of substitution, replacing a bandit’s face with that of the president who says, “Birth certificates? We don’t need no stinkin’ birth certificates!” The caption directly refers to Obama’s earlier refusal to provide a copy of his birth certificate. This image evokes a scene from the popular 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. A Mexican bandit terrorizing the countryside and impersonating a Federal policeman speaks nearly similar lines, “Badges? I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!” It was later widely popularized through parodic use in TV shows, films, cartoons, songs, books, video games and news stories (probably the most popular being the 1974 film Blazing Saddles).

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Figure 9 Because it is so imbedded in popular culture, this image’s references should immediately evoke humor. Yet a deeper construct through the impersonation is the correspondence of traits from one likeness, the bandit, to another, Barack Obama; and from the imitation policeman to the illegitimate president. D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, portrayed some African Americans as rapist-beasts, justified their lynching, and glorified the Ku Klux Klan. Mulatto men in particular were depicted as power hungry criminals. “Don’t miss these Coming Attractions!!!!!”

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Figure 10

(Figure 11) presents a digitally altered movie poster featuring Barack Obama, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid impersonating the TV and film actors the Three Stooges starring in a film entitled Destruction of a Nation. Obama is identified as Bo, the name of the Obama family dog. Here again, an operation of substitution suggests similarity between the impersonators and the cultural references: Obama and leading Democrats are slapstick comedians who are maniacally destroying a nation with “ultra liberal policies” – a nation needing rescue by a white counterforce. The word reversal in the title (Birth becomes Destruction) is also an operation of exchange creating a paradox that charges the message with more potency. As with the white supremacist Stormfront Web site, this image characterizes the other with dual traits of criminality and bumbling idiocy.

The Tom Stereotype The image of the Tom is one of a loyal “darkie,” a happy and contented slave. The term “Uncle Tom,” from the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, has long been used as a slur to disparage an African American person who appears humiliatingly subservient or deferential to white people. One of the Tom’s characters, the “shoe shine boy,” (Pilgrim 2000c) is an iconic image that romanticized

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Figure 11 poverty and racism. “Voted Best Picture of 2010” (Figure 12) depicts Obama kneeling in front of former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin while shining her shoes. This rhetorical juxtaposition of contrasts creates surprise and intrigue…as well as irony and satire. Whereas candidate Palin was notorious for misspeaking and Obama noted for his eloquent speech, here he is depicted as a silent servant who desires white approval, both characteristics of the Tom stereotype.

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Figure 12

Discussion and Conclusion Guided by Durand’s rhetorical matrix, popular culture references, social identity theory, and past research on racial stereotyping as “other,” we decoded these provocative visual images to understand their persuasive intent. We found that a complex schema of rhetorical strategies coupled with familiar cultural allusions proposed racial stereotypes typically found both in contemporary hate group Web sites and in centuries-old popular and material culture rooted in U.S. slavery. To satisfy our first research question, within the images we identified all of the rhetorical strategies theorized by Durand: addition, suppression, substitution and exchange. In operations of addition, Obama is grouped within a family unit of chimpanzees and he is partnered as a “brother” with Tiger Woods. In an operation of suppression, when overt meaning is withheld from the image, Obama becomes the answer to the riddle – an answer supplied by the viewer through identifying him as a child asking who fathered him. In acts of substitution, Obama stands in for popular culture characters iconic for buffoonery and brutishness, for example a television comedian, a pimp, and a Mexican bandit. In operations of exchange, Obama is placed in contradictory or impossible situations, as when a drill sergeant berates him or in images where various animals evoke him. Formative studies establishing the force of appropriated cultural allusions in moving viewers to co-construct meaning extended our understanding of how common cultural references were employed. We asked how they functioned in communicating an ideology or world­ view. Here we found allusions to popular entertainment, familiar

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posters and signage, common foods, recognizable costumes, film references, and associations with animals – cultural references that recipients could quite easily recognize and assign meaning to. The appropriations of these familiar cultural references with satiric and critical rhetorical constructions – comparisons, contrasts, perversions – provided the clues to understanding the worldviews communicated by the images. All the images assigned centuries-old racial stereotypes to Obama, characterizing him as coon, animal, brute and Tom. The use of humor as the vehicle to deliver these visual messages facilitated recognition, comprehension, and possibly acceptance. Humor also served as a coping mechanism; as visual jokes responding to a political “disaster” (Ellis 2002), the images functioned as an alternative to traditional media’s dominant narrative welcoming the new administration. In answering our third question of whether there is a relationship between the rhetoric of well-known hate group Web sites such as Stormfront and the rhetorical strategies in the forwarded e-mail, we found ample evidence that there is an agreement. Whereas Duffy’s (2003) analysis of online hate group Web sites had identified a vision of superiority maintained primarily through demonization of the outgroup, our analysis revealed the forwarded images “othered” Obama as a beast and an animal. As Meddaugh and Kay (2009, 261) found Stormfront used techniques to legitimize racist rhetoric by co-opting credible sources, we identified similar techniques. For example, the “Marine Corps” image can be considered an example of “reasonable” racism as it uses an established military narrative to support its believability. The “U.S. Economy” image appears as ‘reasonable racism’ with its info graphic visually co-opting a format that commonly communicates credible, fact-based statistics. In the portrayal of Obama as the buffoon Steve Urkel, the image characterizes him as the other with dual traits of criminality and bumbling idiocy; stereotypes also used by Stormfront. Even the side-by-side comparison with Tiger Woods makes a ‘reasonable’ argument that, just as sports heroes can do wrong, so can presidents – at least, African American presidents. We also discovered that the forwarded e-mail images’ veiled authorship and attempts to make racist stereotypes more reasonable both resonate with Stormfront’s platform that allows racist groups to obscure bias by failing to fully disclose their views and history, as well as its pseudo-scientific evidence. The e-mails’ representations cloaked as “jokes”

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borrowed the guile of humor to mask racist stereotypes as more benign, acceptable, and even just “common sense.” Our final question asked, “how do the e-mailed images define the social identity of the forwarders and Obama as ‘the other?’” Sharing e-mailed “humorous” images of Obama serves to normalize offensive and racist materials and exaggerate the differences and perceived negative characteristics of Obama and, by extension his supporters. Like the pseudo-objective news accounts used to create “rational” arguments for racism, humorous e-mails form the basis for shared worldviews and encourage the group to cohere more closely. Those who “get the joke” reassert their cultural and moral superiority and in a sense build a sort of malevolent community, a similar phenomenon as that described in Bostdorff ’s (2004) study of KKK web site community building. Some images, such as Obama as a ridiculous witch doctor (Figure 13), tend to Figure 13 evoke not only humor, but disgust. Previous research cited above reveals that people are more likely to forward messages that have powerful emotional appeals. Moreover, as Gass and Seiter (2007) argue, when members of a social group act in a certain way such as receiving and forwarding certain types of images and messages, other members of the group may feel compelled to engage in order to underscore and reinforce their group membership and thus their shared beliefs (134).

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Because these forwarded e-mails are shallow, trivial, sophomoric and hateful, it would be easy to dismiss them as mere political ephemera. This study did not attempt to show political effects from these kinds of messages, yet we believe they serve as a warning that in-group jokes steeped in racism and hate may lead to serious consequences. As people are able to limit the content of messages they consume only to those consonant with their beliefs, a spiral of selectivity may emerge (Slater 2007). Slater’s model suggests that as that spiral shrinks, alternative points of view recede from an individual’s consciousness serving to strengthen the social identity of the group and increasing the demon­ization of out-groups. We conclude with some provocative questions: How influential are cultural forms in assisting group cohesion and their mobilization? What are the broader political contexts impacted by subverting visual culture? How might online racism within a leaderless community cohere into political action? Further research should examine how emerging digital forms, content, and interactivity may contribute to our understanding of the role of images, video, music and other cultural manifestations in fostering group social identity, framing partisan beliefs, and affecting the political process.

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Chiu, Hung-Chang, Y.C. Hsieh, Y.-H. Kao, and M. Lee. 2007. “The Determinants of Email Receivers’ Disseminating Behaviors on the Internet.” Journal of Advertising Research 47(4): 524–34. Christensen, P. Neils, Hank Rothgerber, Wendy Wood, and David Matz. 2004. “Social Norms and Identity Relevance: A Motivational Approach to Normative Behavior.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30(10): 1295–309. Connors, Joan L. 2005. “Visual Representations of the 2004 Presidential Campaign: Political Cartoons and Popular References.” American Behavioral Scientist 49(3): 479–88. Cooper, Troy B. 2009. “Appropriating Visual Form: The iPod “Silhouette” Campaign as Representative Form.” Visual Communication Quarterly 16(2): 90–107. Daniels, Jessie. 2009. Cyber Racism White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights. Lanham, Maryland: Roman and Littlefield. Duffy, Margaret E. 2003. “Web of Hate: A Fantasy Theme Analysis of the Rhetorical Vision of Hate Groups Online.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 27(3): 291–312. Duffy, Margaret, Janis Teruggi Page, and Rachel Young. (in press). “Obama as Anti-American: Visual Folklore in Right-Wing Forwarded E-mails and Construction of Conservative Social Identity.” The Journal of American Folklore 125(496):177-203. Durand, Jacques. 1970/1983. “Rhetoric and the Advertising Image.” Trans. Theo van Leeuwen, Australian Journal of Cultural Studies (1)2: 29-61. Edwards, Janis L. 2001. “Running in the Shadows in Campaign 2000: Candidate Metaphors in Editorial Cartoons.” American Behavioral Scientist 44(12): 2140–53. Ellis, Bill. 2002. “Making a Big Apple Crumble: The Role of Humor in Constructing a Global Response to Disaster.” New Directions in Folklore 6: Special Monograph Issue. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/ handle/2022/6911/NDiF_issue_6_complete.pdf?sequence=4. Edwards, Janis L., and Carol K. Winkler. 1997. “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83(3): 289–310. Fahri, Paul. 2011. “The E-mail Rumor Mill is Run by Conservatives.” Washington Post, Nov. 19. http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/when-it-comesto-e-mailed-political-rumors-conservatives-beat-liberals/2011/11/17/ gIQAyycZWN_stor.

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Ferber, Abby L. 1998. White Man Falling. Boston: Rowman & Littlefield. Foss, Sonja K. 2005. “Theory of Visual Rhetoric.” In Handbook of Visual Communication. Eds. Ken Smith, Sandra Moriartyl Gretchen Barbatsis, and Keith Kenney, 141-52. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Frank, Russell. 2004. “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Go Photoshopping: September 11 and the Newslore of Vengeance and Victimization.” New Media & Society 6(3): 633–58. Gass, Robert H., and John Seiter. 2007. Persuasion, Social Influence and Compliance Gaining, (3rd edition). Boston: Pearson. Gerstein, Josh. 2010. “Republican Leaders Distance Selves From ‘Fear’ Doc.” Politico. March 8. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34043. html. Greene, Steven. 2004. “Social Identity Theory and Party Identification.” Social Science Quarterly 85(1): 136–53. Halbert, Debora. “Male Hysteria: Tracking Masculine Fear through Political Satire Surrounding the 2004 Presidential Election.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Albuquerque, New Mexico. March 16, 2006. Mhttp://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/9/7/7/9/pages97799/14 p97799-1.php. Hayes, Christopher. 2007. “The New Right-Wing Smear Machine.” The Nation, October 27. http://www.thenation.com/article/new-right-wingsmear-machine. Kelley-Romano, Stephanie, and Victoria Westgate. 2007. “Blaming Bush: An Analysis of Political Cartoons following Hurricane Katrina.” Journalism Studies 8(5): 755–73. Kramer, Elise. (2011). “The Playful is Political.” Language in Society (40): 137-68. Kuipers, Giselinde. 2005.“’Where Was King Kong When We Needed Him?’: Public Discourse, Digital Disaster Jokes, and the Functions of Laughter After 9/11.” The Journal of American Culture 28(1): 70–84. Lippmann, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt Brace. Maio, Gregory R. Haddock, Geoffrey. 2007. In: Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (2nd ed.). Kruglanski, Arie W. (Ed.); Higgins, E. Tory (Ed.); New York, NY, US: Guilford Press. 565-586. MacDonald, J. Fred. 2009. “Blacks and White TV” J. Fred MacDonald: Media History e-Books. http://jfredmacdonald.com/bawtv/bawtv21. htm.

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McGee, Michael Calvin. 1980. “The ‘Ideograph:’ A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66: 1-16. Meddaugh, Priscilla M., and Jack Kay. 2009. “Hate Speech or “Reasonable Racism?” The Other in Stormfront.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 24: 251-68. Medhurst, Martin J., and Michael DeSousa. 1981. “Political Cartoons as Rhetorical Form: A Taxonomy of Graphic Discourse.” Communication Monographs 48(3): 197–236. Oring, Elliott. 1987. “Jokes and the Discourse on Disaster.” The Journal of American Folklore 100 (397): 276–86. Phelps, Joseph, Regina Lewis, Lynne Mobilio, David Perry, and Naranjan Raman. 2004.“Viral Marketing or Electronic Word-of-Mouth Advertising: Examining Consumer Responses and Motivations to Pass Along E-mail.” Journal of Advertising Research 44(4): 333–48. Pilgrim, David. “The Brute Caricature.” Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Ferris State University. October 2000a. http://www.ferris. edu/jimcrow/brute/. Pilgrim, David. “The Coon Caricature.” Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Ferris State University. October 2000b. http://www.ferris. edu/jimcrow/coon/. Pilgrim, David. “The Tom Caricature.” Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Ferris State University. December 2000c. http://www.ferris. edu/jimcrow/tom/. Rich, Frank. 2006. The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina. New York, NY: The Penguin Press. Richardson, John D. 2005. “Switching Social Identities: The Influence of Editorial Framing on Reader Attitudes toward Affirmative Action and African Americans.” Communication Research 32(4): 503–28. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House. Slater, Michael D. 2007. “Reinforcing Spirals: The Mutual Influence of Media Selectivity and Media Effects and Their Impact on Individual Behavior and Social Identity.” Communication Theory 17(3): 281–303. Smith, Ben. 2010. “Exclusive: RNC Document Mocks Donors, Plays on ‘Fear.’” Politico. March 3. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/33866.html. Smyth, Willie. 1986. “Challenger Jokes and the Humor of Disaster.” Western Folklore 45(4): 243–60.

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Stein, Sarah R. 2002. The “1984” Macintosh Ad: Cinematic Icons and Constitutive Rhetoric in the Launch of a New Machine.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88(2):169–92. Tajfel, Henri. 1982. “Instrumentality, Identity and Social Comparisons.” In Social Identity and Intergroup Relations, Ed. Henri Tajfel, 483-507. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tajfel, Henri and John C. Turner. 1986. The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior. In Psychology of Intergroup Relations, Eds. Stephen Worchel and William G. Austin, 7-24. Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall.  Turner, John C. 1982. “Towards a Cognitive Redefinition of the Social Group.” In Social Identity and Intergroup Relations, Ed. Henri Tajfel, 15-40. Cambridge: 0Cambridge University Press. Thorson, Kjerstin, Timothy Fung, and Emily Vraga. 2008. “How You Feel Makes You What You Are: Partisan Reactions to Political Incivility Online.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Chicago, IL, August 6-9. http://smad.journalism.wisc.edu/papers/thorson-fung-vraga-2008. pdf. Turner, John C. 1982. “Towards a Cognitive Redefinition of the Social Group.” In Social Identity and Intergroup Relations, Ed. Henri Tafjel, 15–40. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. UPI.2011.“Study Finds Less Tolerance for Racism.”United Press International. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/08/25/Study-findsless-tolerance-for-racism/UPI-67871314298459/#ixzz1WpHeqXAR. Woods, Keith. “Talking Race Over a Slice of Watermelon.” Poynter Organization. March 2, 2011. http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/news gathering-storytelling/diversity-at-work/14065/talkingrace-over-a-slice-of-watermelon/. Zakia, Richard. 2007. Perception and Imaging, Photography – A Way of Seeing (3rd edition). Burlington, MA: Focal Press.

Anachronism Juxtaposition of contrasts creating surprises, intrigues, irony, satire

4. Opposition

paradox

Seeming absurd but possibly true

Repetition that plays off opposition, suggesting double meaning (perception/reality)

Unordered elements that are propositional

3. Difference

5. False Homology ambiguity

Repetition Like, yet not identical. An agreement or comparison

A Addition

1 Identity . Similarity 2.

Relation between elements

Feigning a secret; false modesty; slight mention while professing omission; trompe l’oeil

Repetition in proximity, but with different meaning

Suspension; resolution delayed; meaning uncertain Expressions of doubt or reticence

Ellipsis Salient features suppressed

Puns (one or two elements suggesting different meanings; humorous) Use of element in sense opposite of its meaning

Roundabout expression Euphemism

Metonym Synedoche

Hyperbole Allusion, impersonation, metaphor

Rhetorical operation B C Suppression Substitution

Contradiction

Repetition of ideas in inverse order

Impossible situations; illogical sequences; routine order followed by order inversion

Inversion Concrete object gives meaning to abstract idea. Signifier>Referent = Sign Fragmentation; without connectors

D Exchange

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Table 1 Visual Rhetoric Matrix

Mis/reading Obama   Evidence, the Internet and the Battle Over Citizenship

Tom Nakayama We are the Birthers, we are those who are under attack by the Mainstream Media, the once bastions of truth, have become the purveyors of cheap words. They want to mock us by giving us a label to discredit and marginalize us. – birthers.org

Q

uestions about Barack Obama’s citizenship arose before he was elected to the presidency of the United States. As a site of contention, citizenship has long remained a issue in the U.S. (and elsewhere), and its definition is filled with ideological definitions over insiders and outsiders. Since the 1790 Naturalization Law that limited naturalization to “free, white persons,” citizenship has served as a site for defining who “we” are (and who “we” are not). The United States, however, has established that only natural-born citizens are eligible to be president. Rather than simply an insider/outsider binary, the requirement that one have been born within the U.S borders creates an even narrower notion of belonging and eligibility. My own fascination with the Birthers and the Tea Partiers stems from my interest in understanding “Americanness” as an ideograph and as a cipher that must be filled. As a national identity, who are we? Whatever criteria are set for proving citizenship, what counts as evidence? The case of the Birthers and their challenge to President Obama’s citizenship highlights the problem of evidence in our postmodern era.

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My own grandmother was born in Stockton, California and therefore was a U.S. citizen. Yet, once she married my grandfather, a Japanese man, ineligible for citizenship due to racial restrictions that would not be lifted until 1952, she lost her citizenship. She was officially “stateless” under terms of the Cable Act. In 1952, she applied for U.S. citizenship, even though she had not lived anywhere else. She would not visit Japan until well into her “golden years.” Although explorations into whiteness and its place in the critical race approaches to communication have flourished since the turn of the last century, interrogations of whiteness are neither new nor have they disappeared in the ‘post-racial’ era. Since the election of President Barack Obama, discussions about whiteness need revisiting, as public performances of whiteness and its discourses call for more attention. Whiteness is a constantly shifting configuration of rhetorics that serve different ends (Nakayama and Krizek 1995). But what is happening to whiteness in this new context, the first biracial president? As recently, as the October 25, 2010 issue of Newsweek magazine (Romano), we are reminded that: “When Barack Obama took office, experts rushed to declare an end to the old battles over race, religion, and reproductive rights.” In my reading of the rise of the Birthers and dispute over President Obama’s birthplace, I want to focus on the ways that “proof ” and “evidence” function within a racialized audience reading of increasingly disenfranchised whiteness. In this sense, whiteness is an ideology and way of viewing the world, rather than a skin color. The frame of whiteness is the only way that I could make sense of this Birther phenomenon.

Post-racial When President Obama was elected, an immediate declaration seemed to have been made that the United States had finally arrived at a “post-racial” society. As seductive as this rhetoric may have been, I was suspicious of this claim. The strong desire for a post-racial society does not make it so. At first, I had trouble finding these “experts” who proclaimed that we had arrived at a post-racial society. My confusion in searching for these experts stemmed from my confusion over what an expert might be. Then I realized that the media were referring to other reporters and commentators as the experts. Daniel Schorr

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(2008), on “All Things Considered” on NPR, loudly proclaimed our entry into a post-racial society: Welcome to the latest buzz word in the political lexicon, post-racial. […]The post-racial era, as embodied by Obama, is the era where civil rights veterans of the past century are consigned to history and Americans begin to make race-free judgments on who should lead them. Post-racial began to come into vogue after Obama won the Iowa caucuses and faired well in the New Hampshire primary. The Economist called it a post-racial triumph and wrote that Obama seemed to embody the hope that America could transcend its divisions.

This post-racial celebration did not last long. On the night that Obama was elected, three white men burned down a black church in Springfield, Mass. In their confessions, they claimed to have done it in anger that a black man was elected president. Two pleaded guilty, receiving sentences of 14 years and nine years in prison. The third was convicted in a trial and received four and one half years (“Arsonists jailed”). Although President Obama has one black parent and one white parent, these men did not burn down one black church and one white church. I make this point to underscore the racialized way that Obama is constructed and seen, as well as to highlight the ways that whiteness functions. Explosion of anti-Obama rhetoric focused on “mis” reading him. A report in February 2011 by the Public Policy Polling group found that 51 percent of GOP members believe that he was not born in the U.S. Only 28 percent believe that he was ( Jackson 2011). As recently as November 5, 2012, the Birther webpage proudly claims that: “Over 60 percent of the American public has some sort of question surrounding Obama’s eligibility now” (Birthers 2012). Once Obama assumed the presidency, the emergence of white performances against his legitimacy began to appear. These performative rhetorics continued despite the evidence of his birth certificate and the affirmation that he was born in Hawaii by the State of Hawaii, galvanizing a number of people. Although some people needed to be reminded that Hawaii was a U.S. state at the time of Obama’s birth, the continual denials of his birthplace have even led some states to debate enacting laws that require candidates to prove their natural-born citizenship. In spite of all the evidence, the “birther” movement insists

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they know the ‘truth’ and Obama is not the legitimate president of the U.S. The Tea Party movement (originally called the tea baggers) emerged quickly thereafter with a focus on “taking back our country” although they do not say from whom they are taking it back. Initially, TEA signified “taxed enough already,” but this focus of the Tea Party soon was overcome with a much larger attack on President Obama. In this rhetoric, Obama becomes an odd combination of “Satan,” “Hitler,” “liar,” “Muslim,” “lying African,” and other negative characters, but wrapped in a rhetoric about a return to “our” roots. Wrapping themselves in the flags and clothes of eighteenth century America, tea partiers call for a return to who “we” “really” are. We need to embrace the original intent of the American revolutionaries, but that intent is left very open. But within the framework of whiteness, how open is this interpretation? Does it mean a return to when slavery was accepted at the time of the American Revolution? Does it mean the original intent when the framers said, “All men are created equal”? Given the reaction to President Obama’s election, it seems as if the objection is against the election of a non-white president. As the original intent of the founding fathers may have been that only “whites” could be Americans, it is not difficult to read how this call to “take back our country” is a call for whites to reclaim the nation. This reading is further reinforced by the 2012 campaign rallies with some Romney supporters wearing t-shirts that read: “Put the white back in the White House” (Flock 2012). The racialization of the presidency, and perhaps I am naïve to think it was ever not racialized, highlights this reading of the concerns over Obama’s birth certificate, its authenticity, and how we “know” that he is a natural born U.S. citizen. Debates about evidence in the legal arena fall under different criteria and standards than evidence in the pubic sphere. In this case, the public sphere, especially the Internet, guide the criteria for what counts as evidence. Much of what is posted on the Internet can be taken as “proof ” of various positions that audiences already want to believe. Yet, beyond the reporters and news commentators, I find little support to show that others are embracing this emerging view of U.S. society. It seems that whiteness has become a site of struggle over different meanings and how whiteness is deployed. This focus on whiteness as a site of struggle demonstrates its contested character and how we may understand the world, and our future. The claim that we are

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“post-racial” can be read in different ways. Author Uzodinma Iweala (2008) bluntly notes that: This entire narrative is a media-concocted fiction. America is decidedly not “post-racial.” […] The desire that the subject of race be set aside in the current “post-racial” political conversation shows that society is unwilling to openly face its worst fear: Not only could a black man ably lead this nation, but the mere fact of a black president would force both the majority and minority populations to reset our parameters for normality. Even if we were to confront head-on these and other questions surrounding race, we are unlikely to grow into the “post-racial” modifier some of us so crave. That’s because the idea of “post-raciality” is a total fallacy. Should Obama become president, he will not suddenly cease to be black, nor will white Americans be any less white.

The criticism of “post-racial” as something already achieved through the election of President Obama underscores one barrier to “post-racial”: in this definition, post-racial means that we drop our racial identification – of ourselves and others. In contrast, those on the right are also not ready to embrace this new “post-racial” society. Post-racial is a different term for anti-white which sparks a new term, “post-white” as the new world that we will be living. On his political blog, Lawrence Auster (2008) writes: The post-racial America of which Obama’s champions speak does not mean the end of racial preferences for nonwhites. It does not mean the end of constant accusations of white racism. It does not mean the end of the systematic cover-up of blacks’ lower abilities, and of the fact that these lower abilities, not white racism, are the reason blacks are behind. It does not mean the end of the systematic cover up of the true facts of black-on-white crime. It does not mean the end of mandatory sensitivity training for whites. It does not mean the end of the belief that there is a moral cloud over America’s entire history up until the civil rights movement – or, in the event Obama is elected, up until the election of Barack Obama. If post-racial America does not mean the removal of these pro-nonwhite, anti-white policies and beliefs, what does it mean?

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Assessing Evidence in a Postmodern World It means a post-white America, an America transformed by the symbolic removal of whiteness as the country’s explicit or implicit historic and majority identity. This is the consummation of which Obama’s supporters dream. In Obama’s post-racial America, all the anti-white policies and attitudes, from affirmative action to open borders for Hispanics to the multicultural rewriting of history to endless compaigns [sic] against “white racial privilege,” will remain in place. What will change is that whites will not protest these anti-white policies any more, will not mutter under their breath about them any more, will not even think about muttering under their breath about them any more. Instead, they will unreservedly embrace them, in the joy of racial unity and harmony. Post-racial America is an America in which whites, as whites, go silent forever.

This construction of “post-racial” sees whites embracing a post-white world in which they are marginalized. The utopian vision of the “post-racial” rhetoric is not a part of this post-white rhetoric. The two visions are seemingly incompatible. Here we can see the contested site of whiteness and what it means. Also on the right is conservative writer Shelby Steele (2008) who sees the “post-racial” game as one that dupes young whites. He argues: Obama’s post-racial idealism told whites the one thing they most wanted to hear: America had essentially contained the evil of racism to the point at which it was no longer a serious barrier to black advancement. Thus, whites became enchanted enough with Obama to become his political base. It was Iowa – 95 percent white – that made him a contender. Blacks came his way only after he won enough white voters to be a plausible candidate. […] But there is an inherent contradiction in all this. When whites – especially today’s younger generation – proudly support Obama for his post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary motivation. They think and act racially, not post-racially. The point is that a post-racial society is a bargainer’s ploy: It seduces whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation. A real post-racialist could not be bargained with and would not care about displaying

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or documenting his racial innocence. Such a person would evaluate Obama politically rather than culturally.

Steele moves to individualism from the post-racial focus on the social. Post-racial, in this view, is a focus on the individual (i.e., Obama and his politics). Any consideration of race or racial difference is not post-racial. From the left, Henry Giroux (2009) argues more forcefully against embracing “post-racial” by highlighting the role of whites in the 2008 election. Whites did not embrace Obama and claiming arrival in to “post-racial” America is very problematic: Obama won the 2008 election because he was able to mobilize 95 percent of African-Americans, two-thirds of all Latinos and a large proportion of young people under the age of 30. At the same time, what is generally forgotten in the exuberance of this assessment is that the majority of white Americans voted for the John McCainSarah Palin ticket. While “post-racial” may mean less overt racism, the idea that we have moved into a post-racial period in American history is not merely premature – it is an act of willful denial and ignorance.

The emergence of “post-racial America” is a complete fabrication, but one that is useful in setting up points of coalition for very different political projects. While the term, ‘post-racial’ has been bandied about since the campaign, it is not clear (beyond MSM) who is embracing this vision of U.S. society. The author of “Angry Black Bitch” blog, Pamela Merritt (2009), puts it bluntly: “I started hearing television commentators applauding the election as a sign that America is now “post-racial.” Suffice it to say that despite my excitement, this black American thought that theory was a load of crap and it didn’t take long for events in America to challenge the assertion too.”Race is omnipresent in everyday life and everyday interpretations. On the left, the burdens of history mean that embracing a post-racial view results in the denial of the past and the present. But who is embracing post-racial? And why? On the right, the term post-racial becomes a rallying cry as well, but the term gets filled with very different politics. Again, no one is claiming or embracing post-racial America. Instead, the critique of post-racial America is grounded in identifying the ways that race gets used against whites. For example, affirmative action, programs that recognize racial

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disparities and work to close thee gaps in education, income, and so on. Race continues to be seen as a divisive force that creates anti-white alliances among people of color. When President Obama sided with Professor Gates against the Cambridge police officer (Crowley) – describing the police as “acting stupidly” (Tapper 2009), yet another example of the importance of race became more evidence that we are not in a post-racial society. While this reading is certainly possible, would not it also be possible to read this alignment as Harvard elites closing ranks against lower class blue-collar workers? Did having a few beers to chat about the controversy mean that social class differences were erased? Beer, as a working class symbol (although the kind of beer makes a difference), was the drink of choice. Or was it a male-bonding moment in which beer takes center stage as the appropriate drink for such bonding across racial divides?

The Hawaii Issue The location of Barack Obama’s birth, the U.S. State of Hawaii, raises a different issue about the evidence of his birth. The admission of Hawaii as one of the 50 states, equal to Texas, Virginia or Pennsylvania, was a contested point at the time of its admission. Because Hawaii was not a majority “white” territory when it was considered for admission to the United States, many concerns were raised. In contrast, these concerns were not raised about the admission of Alaska as a state, as Alaska had and still has a majority white population. Hawaii’s largely Asian American population raised concerns about the shifting nature of “American” and the connection with whiteness. Ziker (2007) tells the story of one concern about Hawaii that extends to a much larger global view: “We feel compelled to protest the admittance of a foreign country into the Union of the U.S.A.,” read the letter from the Reverend and Mrs. H. D. Mayrant. If the U.S. Congress would extend equal citizenship rights to a set of islands populated by “Japanese, Philipine, Chinese, Negroes, Puerto Ricans, mixed bloods, and Hawaiians,” the residents of Palestine, Texas, asked incredulously, would it “next reach out for Haiti, the negro country, or for Taiwan?”

Beyond Hawaii, there has been an ongoing concern about the “Americanness” of these other people who are being incorporated into a much larger American Empire. Hawaii remains under suspicion and

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Obama’s birth in this state further complicates any questions about his birth. The notion that Hawaii’s status as a state is under question – at this time, over 50 years after its admission into the union as a state – reflects ongoing concerns about Hawaii’s racial configuration. Somehow, it is not “really” American. As the Daily Kos emphasized in a sarcastic way: “Why do the Birthers hate Hawaii? August 21, 1959, a day that will live in infamy.    It was on this date that Hawaii became a state.  Apparently, it was a very bad decision” (The Magician 2012). Once Obama assumed the presidency, the emergence of white performances against his legitimacy began to appear. These performative rhetorics despite the evidence of his birth certificate and the affirmation that he was born in Hawaii by the State of Hawaii, this argument galvanized a number of people. Although some people needed to be reminded that Hawaii was a U.S. state at the time of Obama’s birth, the continual denials of his birthplace have even led some states to debate enacting laws that require candidates to prove their natural-born citizenship. In spire of all evidence, the “birther” movement insists they know the ‘truth’ and Obama is not the legitimate president of the U.S. The Tea Party movement works to embrace the original intent of the American revolutionaries, but that intent is left very open, but open for interpretation. Yet, this nostalgia for the past is not mourning for something that was lost. In Freudian terms, mourning and melancholia are distinct processes that are useful here for reading the Tea Partiers. Mourning refers to the loss of something that one once had (Freud 2005), such as the loss of a parent or a pet. This loss is grounded in a material reality. In contrast, melancholia refers to the loss of something that one never had. Thus, one can have melancholia about never having had a child, but the child never existed so the child was never really lost. One might imagine what that child might have been like and fill that void with all kinds of fantasies or fictions about that child. For the Tea Partiers, they feel a loss of an America that never really was. America never was always, completely and only white. The founding fathers never did believe in complete freedom for everyone as slavery was not eliminated, women were not given the right to vote at that time, and not everyone was eligible to be an American. The 1790 Naturalization Law limited eligibility to “free, white people.” Although they never defined what “white” meant, the abolition of the

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racial requirement was finally eliminated in 1952. This idealized past, then is a fabrication, but one in which the president was legitimate. Although whites remain the majority group in the U.S., their feelings of marginalization reflect this need to act out and respond. On the one hand, it is not even clear if Obama is the first black president, as the debates about his racial identity continue, but Washington is far from “taken over” or run by African Americans or non-whites. Yet these performative rhetorics continue.

Presumption Debates about evidence in the legal arena fall under different criteria and standards than evidence in the pubic sphere. In this case, the public sphere, especially the Internet, guide the criteria for what counts as evidence. On the Internet, the criteria is particularly fluid and seems to be driven largely by whatever people will believe. In other words, evidence and proof lie with the reader’s pre-existing views. Evidence hinges on the notion of presumption and where the burden of proof lies. If we are presumed innocent until proven guilty, the prosecution has the burden of proof and must show that we have committed some crime. In the case of Obama, the Birthers attempt to shift the burden to the President. For example, from the Birthers webpage: The person to ask is Barrack [sic] Hussein Obama, Jr. and the two questions to ask are, 1. Many people do not believe you were born in Hawaii a minimum prerequisite to be a natural-born citizen. Will you authorize the state of Hawaii to release all the records surrounding your birth from the day the registration of your birth was filed in August of 1961 to this day? 2. Many people believe you are not a natural-born citizen even if you were born in Hawaii, because your father was not and never was a citizen of the United States and as you stated your birth was governed by the British Nationality Act of 1948, making you a dual citizen of the United States and Great Britain at birth. Can you provide any evidence to the American people that this dual citizenship at birth is not in conflict to the meaning and intent of the natural born citizen clause as the founding fathers understood it? (Thank you Karl Rove n.d.).

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The April 2011 release of the long-form of Obama’s birth certificate seemed to have turned the tide against the Birthers. In releasing the long-form birth certificate, Obama noted that: “We’re not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers” (quoted in Silverlieb 2012). President Obama here is trying to marginalize the Birthers and re-focus the discussion on more important national issues. If the burden of proof lies with him to “prove” that he was, indeed, born in a U.S. state – Hawaii – then, for many people, the long-form suffices to demonstrate his birth. Yet the continual challenges to his legitimacy continue and will likely continue well into the coming years.

Conclusion At the time of this writing, the 2012 presidential election has just concluded and President Obama has been re-elected. In the coming years, there will be many analyses of why he won over Mitt Romney. I should point out, however, that in another attempt to appeal to voters, Mitt Romney played to the Birther audience by saying at a rally in Michigan: “Now I love being home, in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born. Ann was born at Henry Ford Hospital, I was born at Harper Hospital. No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate; they know that this is the place we were born and raised” (Serwer 2012). Although he does not say that he is white, the enthymematic reasoning here is that he is not asked for his birth certificate, as everyone knows that he is a white American. The competing notions of what whiteness means and how whiteness functions highlight the contested frames of whiteness at hand. This contestation is an important reconfiguration of racial politics in the United States. The battle over what whiteness does and should mean and how it should function has been put under tremendous stress during the two elections of President Obama. It may seem that the Birther movement has reached its conclusion. Yet, it may continue to serve as political force in U.S. politics as others strive for political office. Only time will tell. In a postmodern world, the negotiation of evidence is fluid, as it serves very different ends. Yet, we must also remember that in the public arena, the adjudication of President Obama’s birth certificate is left to the public and in the public arena, he has been found to be a U.S. American.

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REFERENCES “Arsonists Jailed for Torching Black Church Only Hours After Obama’s Election Victory.”” 2012, January 19. MSNBC. Retrieved June 2, 2012 from: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46052395/ns/ us_news-crime_and_courts/t/arsonists-jailed-torching-black-church-only-hours-after-obamas-election-victory/#.T8uCEq6d1_k.

Auster, Lawrence. 2008, February 25. “What is Post-racial America?” View From the Right. http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/010000. html.

Birthers, The. 2012, November 5. Retrieved November 6, 2012 from: http://birthers.org/.

Flock, Elizabeth. 2012, October 15. “Racist T-shirt at Romney Rally Highlights How Political Events Have Become Harder to Control. US News & World Report. Retrieved from: http://www.usnews.com/ news/blogs/washington-whispers/2012/10/15/racist-t-shirt-at-romneyrally-shows-how-political-events-have-become-harder-to-control.

Freud, Sigmund. 2005. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In Murder, Mourning, and Melancholia, 201-218. New York: Penguin. Originally published 1917. Giroux, Henry A. 2009, April 27. “Truthout/Perspective.” http://academic.udayton.edu/race/ObamaandRacism/Obama17.htm.

Iweala, Uzodinma. 2008, January 23. “Race Still Matters: Obama’s Success Doesn’t Mean America’s ‘Post-racial’.” Los Angeles Times. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/23/opinion/oe-iweala23.

Jackson, David. 2011, February 15. “Obama’s Citizenship Questioned by GOP Voters, Polling Firm Says.” USA Today. Retrieved June 2, 2012 from: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/

post/2011/02/obamas-citizenship-questioned-by-gop-voters-pollingfirm-says/1#.T8uGDq6d1_k.

Merritt, Pamela. 2009, August 1. “Post-racial America? Dream On.” The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug /01/post-racial-america-myth.

Nakayama, Thomas K. and Robert L. Krizek. 1995. “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81 (3): 291-309. Pareene, Alex. 2009, July 22. “Conspiracies: The Birthers: Who Are They and What do They Want? Gawker.com Retrieved March 6, 2011 from: http://gawker.com/#!5320465/ the-birthers-who-are-they-and-what-do-they-want.

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Phillips, Judson. 2012, August 15. “The Birther Manifesto.” Tea Party Nation. Retrieved November 6, 2012 from: http://www.teapartynation.com/forum/topics/the-birther-manifesto.

Public Policy Polling. 2011, February 15. “Huckabee Tops GOP field, 51% are Birthers and Love Palin.” Raleigh, NC. Retrieved March 4, 2011 from: http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_ US_0215.pdf.

Romano, Andrew. 2010, October 25. “America’s Holy Writ: Tea Party Evangelists Claim the Constitution as Their Sacred Text. Why That’s Wrong.” Newsweek, 34. Saranillio, Dean I. 2010, October. “Colliding Histories Hawaii Statehood at the Intersection of Asians ‘Ineligible to Citizenship’ and Hawaiians ‘Unfit for Self-Government.’” Journal of Asian American Studies, 13 (3): 283-309. Schorr, Daniel. 2008, January 28. “A New, ‘Post-racial’ Political Era in America.” National Public Radio. Retrieved October 31, 2010 from: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18489466.

Serwer, Adam. 2012, August 24. “What to Make of Mitt Romney’s Birther Joke?” Mother Jones. Retrieved October 22 from: http://www. motherjones.com/mojo/2012/08/romney-birtherism-joke-michigan.

Shear, Michael D. 2011, March 1. “Huckabee Questions Obama Birth Certificate.” New York Times. Retrieved March 4, 2011 from: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/huckabee-questions -obama-birth-certificate-claims-he-was-raised-in-kenya/?scp=1&sq=birthers&st=cse.

Silverlieb, Alan. 2012, April 27. “Obama Releases Original Long-form Birth Certificate.” CNN. Retrieved from: http://www.cnn.com/2011/ POLITICS/04/27/obama.birth.certificate/index.html.

Smith, Ben. 2009, March 2. “Culture of Conspiracy: the Birthers.” Politico. Retrieved March 6, 2011 from: http://www.politico.com/ news/stories/0209/19450.html.

Steele, Shelby. 2008, November 5. “Obama Seduced Whites with a Vision of Their Racial Innocence Precisely to Coerce Them Into Acting Out of a Racial Motivation.” Los Angeles Times, http://articles.latimes.com/2008/nov/05/opinion/oe-steele5.

Tapper, Jake. 2009, July 24. “Obama Calls Cambridge Police Officer, Invites Him for a Beer with Gates at the White House.” ABC News. Retrieved from: http://abcnews.go.com/

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blogs/politics/2009/07/obama-calls-cambridge-police-officer-inviteshim-for-a-beer-with-gates-at-the-white-house/.

“Thank you Karl Rove. “ n.d. Birthers.org Retrieved from: http://www. birthers.org/misc/karlandthebuck.html.

The Magician. 2012, June 14. “Hawaii 1, Birthers 0.” Daily Kos. Retrieved from: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06 /14/1100187/-Hawaii-1-Birthers-0.

Thrush, Glenn. 2010, August 29. “President Obama Blasts Lies, Disinformation.” Politico. Retrieved March 4, 2011 from: http:// www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/41575.html.

Ziker, Ann K. 2007, August. “Segregationists Confront American Empire: The Conservative White South and the Question of Hawaiian Statehood, 1947-1959.” Pacific Historical Review, 76 (3): 439-465.

Less Falseness as Antidote to the Anxieties of Postmodernism

F

Linda Steiner

eminist Standpoint Epistemology (FSE) seeks knowledge that is less false, including by being less ethnocentric and less sexist. To put the assertion bluntly, its arguments offer a solution to postmodernism’s sweeping challenge to objectivity and to positivism’s implausibly universalizing accounts of knowledge grounded in the illusion of a “generic” subject. FSE acknowledges the significance of contexts and embraces particularity. FSE offers a real-world, practical account of how to understand knowledge as socially situated, a condition that both limits and enables what one can know. Every body of systematic knowledge is associated with a body of systematic ignorance. The point is that FSE proposes to use – to exploit in the best sense of the word – the distinctive resources of differently situated groups. As such, FSE offers journalists a more responsible and thus better method for assessing evidence and making judgments. Its interlinked concepts of “strong objectivity,” “strong reflexivity,” and “strong method” (a method incorporating the contexts of both discovery and justification) constitute a practical resource for working journalists, providing a “strong ethics” for a “strong journalism.” FSE does not promise an easy fix. Journalists get no simple recipe here. Applying feminist standpoint epistemology requires a complex reorientation among and across individual journalists of all kinds, as well as systemic transformation in the thinking and structure of news organizations. For the project to be effective in a substantive and meaningful way, several intertwined changes are necessary.

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Journalism, we might agree, confronts a quandary. On the one hand is an increasingly strident attack on positivists’ definition of objectivity as impartiality and value-free neutrality. Even as scholars’ skepticism about objectivity has seeped into popular discourse, journalists have been highly reluctant to abandon modernist objectivity, journalism’s hallmark for more than a century. It remains the dominant motif of journalists’ rhetoric about how their journalistic routines and practices render their otherwise embodied experiences immaterial.1 Any defeat of objectivity significantly undermines the professional authority of reporters in assessing evidence, a status already undermined by cynicism about journalism’s institutional profit motive, as well as by citizen journalists who assert they can do reporting just as well. On the other hand, what can be claimed instead? Journalism scholarship has offered no alternatives. Journalists will enjoy no credibility, indeed, no profession, if they endorse postmodern relativism and concede that we all have our own “spin” on information. Retreating to mere pluralism is unacceptable. As one political scientist said of postmodernism, “In a world of radical inequality, relativist resignation reinforces the status quo” (Hawkesworth 1989, 557). Literary theorist Satya Mohanty (1997) acknowledges the lure of relativism, especially given justified caution about “ethnocentric idealizations of rationality and a narrow view of objectivity” (144); but he replaces postmodernism’s “radical perspectivism” with a postpositivist realism that sees objectivity “as a goal of inquiry which includes the possibility of error, self-correction, and improvement” (147). FSE implies a different escape route for knowledge-seekers, including journalists. By advocating maximum participation of diverse knowledge-seekers, which helps journalists understand their own beliefs and values, and by developing alternative practices to articulate better knowledge, FSE can help journalists, who, like scientists, increasingly find their credibility, authority, knowledge, and even their sincerity undermined. This chapter briefly explains FSE and its embrace of partial, situated and embodied knowledge. Feminists have reconfigured conventional terms, performing what Naomi Scheman (2001) calls CPR to resuscitate and strengthen objectivity, thus offering a defensible “strong objectivity.” The chapter also clarifies how FSE may be applied to journalism, at least if several important and intertwined conditions are present, including self-reflexivity. This is a utopian “if.” Postmodernist Donna Haraway (1988) describes feminists’ dilemma as figuring out

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how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world…. All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary” (579).

Haraway calls for a split, contradictory self “who can interrogate positions and be accountable … and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history” (586). Journalists face this same greased pole. In critiquing unlocatable, irresponsible knowledge claims, however, FSE allows us to become answerable for what we learn to see. It does not presume or even seek a detached, disinterested, disembodied generic knower who has transcended gendered/ sexual, class, and racial experience. Instead, at the core is a dynamic model of engaged, committed communities.

Feminist Epistemologies FSE’s original inspiration was sociologist Dorothy Smith, whose 1974 “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology” derived women sociologists’ epistemic advantage over men from their “bifurcated consciousness” i.e., as sociologists and as embodied women. Freed by women’s work to immerse themselves in abstractions, men feel no need to take care of their bodies or homes, and take as real only what corresponds to their mental world. Women’s standpoint, Smith said, unearths women’s lives as experienced in local everyday particularities. Then, starting in the late 1970s, several feminist political philosophers adopted historical materialism’s understanding of epistemic position as inversely related to social position with respect to material labor: The workings of the class system remain invisible if one starts off thought from the capitalist beneficiaries of that system (Hartsock 1998; Harding 2003). In systems of domination, meanwhile, the vision of the dominators will be partial and perverse. Precisely because workers must understand their exploitation, they develop understandings of capitalist ideology. Of course, Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Lukács all ignored the sex/gender system. Taking note of their insights, however, Nancy Hartsock (1983) analogously treated women and men as two (sex) classes: The vision of each inverted the other’s. Men – at least those from dominant groups – become so accustomed to and

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accepting of their own beliefs and behaviors, they cannot interrogate them.2 Feminist epistemologists do not offer a static or unified body of thought. FSE thinkers have gradually distanced themselves from their Western, Enlightenment, and modernist heritage, turning increasingly toward post-Marxist postmodern approaches, as well as global feminisms. Most importantly, FSE has come closer to postmodernists’ insistence that knowledge is always perspectival, local and limited. As a result, to cite one early example, Mary Hawkesworth (1989) legitimately criticized FSE’s problematic claim that women’s unique experiences enable them to pierce through ideological distortions and grasp the truth. But feminist standpoint theory – then still nascent and experimental – was not as standardized or universalizing as she suggested, nor did it become so. More to the point, it has developed considerably over three decades, with some of its pioneers even pulling away (Hartsock 1998). The feminist project is becoming increasingly inclusive of many kinds of differences, including among women and across feminist theorizing. Suggestive of FSE’s recent interest in the importance of race and culture, and post-colonial perspectives, Sandra Harding (2006) emphasizes how, given its complicity with European conquest and expansion, Western science has helped colonize, devalue and subjugate non-Western cultures. The socially situated character of bodies of knowledge, if it limits, also enables what one can know.3 Haraway (1988) explains: “Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular” (590). One major assumption at work here is that cultural identities have epistemic status: They “enable us to read the world in specific ways” (Mohanty 1997, 216). FSE assumes that in gender-structured societies, gender is epistemically relevant and significant. This is not essentialist identity politics, however. No group monopolizes the ability to evaluate truth claims. Indeed, the claim of self-evident, non-constructed “authentic experience” problematically leads to epistemological and ethical relativism, a postmodernist “epistemology of provenance” that undercuts notions of shared experience and of broad-based emancipatory politics (Kruks 2001).4 Instead, “intersectionality” requires taking seriously how gender is inseparable from race, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, class, religion. Social identity does not alone determine judgment, but it is relevant to epistemic decisions and credibility.

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Explaining how these dimensions are long-standing, if shorthand, markers for experience, Linda Martín Alcoff (2001) says: “[I]dentities operate as horizons from which certain aspects or layers of reality can be made visible. In stratified societies, differently identified individuals do not always have the same access to points of view or perceptual plans of observation” (69). What has been most controversial about FSE is its corollary proposition that the situations of “strangers” to the social order are less limiting than others and thereby more likely to generate critical questions about received beliefs. FSE’s reasoning is that dominant versions of inquiry (including in science) exclude certain perspectives about what counts as knowledge, and refuse to consider how the so-called generic knowledge-seeker is actually a privileged (white, heterosexual, materially comfortable Western) man.5 The dominant class actively seeks to remain opaque. It benefits from not interrogating its own assumptions and blocks inquiry that threatens to unmask, much less undo, its privilege. Those who have been excluded from the design and production of knowledge have less interest in ignorance and as such are agents of less partial and distorted descriptions. Using the lives of diverse people, especially when this includes marginalized people, as grounds to criticize dominant knowledge claims can decrease partialities and distortions. Haraway (1988) says subjugated people are more likely to be aware of the typical modes of denial, such as repression and forgetting. Here is the result of such critique: “The subjugated have a decent chance to be on to the god trick [seeing everything from nowhere] and all its dazzling – and, therefore, blinding – illuminations” (584). Subjugated standpoints promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world, and theoretically richer explanations. Thus, feminists’ political engagement with, and focus on, people who are systematically marginalized increases their access to reality. The suggestion that “starting off thought” from the lives of marginalized peoples generates illuminating questions that do not arise in thought that begins with dominant groups is no brief for navel-gazing. Especially thinkers with “center” identities should start with other, different, marginalized, or oppositional women. Gender studies must be attentive to imperialism, class exploitation, and control of sexuality. Nor should marginalized people study only marginalized groups. Instead the goal is “approximating the truth as part of a dialogical relationship among subjects who are differentially situated” (Stoetzler

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and Yuval-Davis 2002, 315). Like Smith (1974), Patricia Hill Collins’s (2000) “outsider within” position similarly emphasizes the resources deriving from the social position of “strangers.” Collins suggests that, as insiders in one respect and outsiders in another, black women sociologists can detect racist and sexist practices of power invisible to those who are only outsiders or only insiders.6 The lesbian activist poet Minnie Bruce Pratt (1984) has said that as a white, southern woman, she was taught a false identity. As a result, she could make judgments only in relation to her own ethical system. She imagined another way of looking at the world “that is more accurate, complex, multi-layered, multi-dimensional, more truthful…. I gain truth when I expand my constricted eye, an eye that has only let in what I have been taught to see” (17). From the perspective of FSE, exclusion is thus advantageous. It helps to generate potentially useful explanations: “The stranger brings to her research just the combination of nearness and remoteness, concern and indifference that are central to maximizing objectivity” (Harding 1991, 124). Many disciplines face similar challenges to the ones confronting journalism and science. Joan Scott (1991), a postmodern historian entirely willing to abandon claims to neutrality, asks: “But, how do we authorize the new knowledge if the possibility of all historical objectivity has been questioned?” (786). For Scott, the answer is a non-foundational history that neither requires nor reproduces naturalized categories. Likewise, FSE does not invoke automatic epistemic privilege. It is no power grab. A standpoint is not a foundational ascription or a point of view held unreflectively. It is connected to embodied experience, not identity per se or women’s (or anyone’s) intuition. Moreover, no particular group automatically knows more or better than others by virtue of position. After all, FSE observes, we can draw knowledge from our experiences without claiming absolute authority. A standpoint arises when people analyze their social location and conditions and then engage in political struggle to change these conditions. Each “identifiable” group is internally heterogeneous, with members of a group having different experiences and thus thinking differently, especially on non-core issues. The agent of empiricist knowledge is culturally and historically disembodied, transhistorical, individualized, homogeneous and unitary. In contrast, within FSE, agents of knowledge are embodied, visible, historically and socially located, multiple, heterogeneous, and contradictory. In the case here,

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knowledge is produced by communities. Thus, a standpoint is a political and theoretical achievement that a community “struggles for.” It must be wrestled out against the apparent realities made to seem natural and obvious by dominant institutions and groups who do not want the falsity or the unjust consequences of their material and conceptual practices revealed. According to Harding (1991, 1993, 1995), feminist knowledge represents not one coherent unity, but multiple and frequently contradictory knowledges. Similarly, the subject of feminist knowledge is multiple and even contradictory, having multiple and contradictory commitments. All women do not share the same views, political goals, or moral values. They are not all victims or witnesses to domination – nor does either such status guarantee undistorted thinking. Each individual feminist knower likewise has a bifurcated consciousness. Effective knowing involves being the outsider within, the marginal person also located at the center. “It is thinking from a contradictory position that generates feminist knowledge” (Harding 1991, 285). Here is another way to phrase FSE’s strongest claim: Since understanding hidden aspects of gender relations requires struggles to change them, generating less partial explanations requires the perspective of those who resist oppression, i.e., a feminist politics. FSE also emphatically rejects essentialist and binary oppositions between “women” and “men.” Instead, it insists that men can and should do feminist (and anti-sexist) work. Just as Marx and Engels could think from proletarian lives without being proletarian, so men grounded in feminist theorizing can begin their thought in women’s lives, and thereby contribute to the analyses of how the gender system works. Men must not refuse to produce feminist analyses on grounds that they are not women (Harding, 1998). Feminist men can make important contributions to feminist thought, whose problems include a tendency to over-valorize femininity. Indeed, men across a variety of disciplines also critique objectivity and positivism. Mohanty (1997) emphasizes that the social constructedness of experiences (including emotions) does not automatically render them arbitrary: “[S]ocial locations facilitate or inhibit knowledge by predisposing us to register and interpret information in certain ways. Our relation to social power produces forms of blindness just as it enables degrees of lucidity” (234). Richmond Campbell (2001), another realist whose work accommodates FSE and its demand for reflexivity, defines objectivity as

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pursuing inquiry in a way conducive to finding out the truth about the subject. His version of “truth-conducive objectivity” neither invokes nor requires impartiality; it avoids circularity and sidesteps the dilemma of determining relevance. But FSE has specified the conditions for producing better knowledge. It offers a method for analyzing whether, in a particular case, objective knowledge or socially produced mystification has resulted from a group’s experiences.

Objectivity The conventional view of objectivity – the one which journalists borrowed from science and on which they continue to rely – is simultaneously too narrow and too broad. Moreover, the dominant conceptualizations of the scientific method are too weak and distorted to identify, much less eliminate, the androcentric assumptions tainting social and natural sciences.7 The conventional “internalist” view is solipsistic and irrational, since, inter alia, it requires people to trust people, institutions, and practices that they either know little about or know to be inequitable (Scheman 2001, 43). Harding concedes that the neutrality ideal can resolve internal differences within a scientific community; it can identify the social values and interests that differ among researchers – the “context of justification.” The social assumptions shared by a scientific community, however, remain invisible. Nor can the “weak objectivity” of “objectivism” distinguish between social or political assumptions that obstruct the growth of knowledge and those that advance it. On one hand, it is “not rigorous or ‘objectifying’ enough; it is too weak to accomplish even the goals for which it has been designed” (Harding 1993, 51, italics in original). Implemented or activated only in the research design, the scientific method comes into play too late in the process to identify the broad historical social desires, interests and values shaping the agendas, contents and thus the results of inquiry. On the other hand, the overly broad claim that objectivity eliminates social values and interests from research ignores how these have radically unequal effects, some generating less distortion, some more. Again, powerful groups hold on to the truth ideal; their alleged right to decide how to organize social relations rests on this (Harding 2006). Objectivity therefore serves dominant groups who do not play fair. Some feminist philosophers have abandoned objectivity, saying it is hopelessly entangled in faulty theory and regressive political

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tendencies, and tainted by its association with Enlightenment notions and modernist science. Arguing that relativism is not horrible, negative, or nihilistic, Lorraine Code (1993), for example, offers a reconstructed “mitigated” relativism. For Code, when experientially significant knowledge is at issue (i.e., as opposed to trivial questions), no necessary and sufficient conditions can ever establish empirical knowledge claims. On the other hand, knowers are always somewhere and thereby both limited and enabled by their locations – historical and cultural location, class, race, gender, religion, and emotion. So, Code (1993) asserts, this version of subjectivity is not free-floating, but rather “grounded in experiences and practices, in the efficacy of dialogic negation and of action” (39). “[K]nowledge is always relative to (i.e., a perspective on, a standpoint in) specifiable circumstances. Hence it is constrained by a realist, empiricist commitment according to which getting these circumstances right is vital to effective action” (Code 1993, 40). Critics of conventional objectivity often accept judgmental relativism as the cost of giving up on value-neutrality. When challenged, even people who are very sure they are right may simply concede that all claims are valid – yours for you, mine for me (Harding 1993, 6162). To Harding (1991, 1995), the choice between objectivism and relativism is false, depressing, fruitless, and unnecessary. She denies that judgmental or epistemological relativism inevitably follows from abandoning the implausible concepts of value-free impartiality and dispassionate objectivity. Harding proposes to have it both ways: real knowledge that is socially situated. Put in reverse, one can accept historical/sociological or cultural relativism (acknowledging that different people hold different beliefs) without accepting epistemological relativism (without treating each person’s judgment as equally valid). With FSE, Mohanty (1997) offers a view of objectivity as theory-dependent: “Precision and depth in understanding the sources and causes of error or mystification help us define the nature of objectivity, and central to this definition would be the possibility of its revision and improvement on the basis of new information” (215). Despite the absence of universally or eternally valid standards of judgment, then, retreating to “anything goes” becomes unnecessary and the term objectivity is resuscitated. “Good biases are distinguished from bad ones when no alternate hypothesis that could be considered by the research community, given appropriate experiences, imagination, and reasoning,

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would explain the evidence as well” (Campbell 2001, 204, italics in original). At the center of feminist research is the necessary link between what Harding calls the “strong forms” of reflexivity, objectiv­ity, and method. Maximizing objectivity requires a more expansive, “stronger” notion of method. Rather than denying the relation between subject and object, strong objectivity takes this relation as reciprocal and then investigates it. This involves strong reflexivity – systematic, critical examination of researchers’ own beliefs, and looking “back at the self in all its cultural particularity from a more distant, critical, objectifying location” (Harding 1991, 151). The community’s politics and culture can be obstacles, Harding concedes, but they also can become resources for producing knowledge. By this token, a non-disinterested relationship of observer and subject is not a negative to be minimized, but an advantage. Denying the researched any “say” in research about them, or standing from above to look down at the object of inquiry, further disempowers the already powerless; this enables powerful social institutions to manage them more effectively. So, conventional “objectivist” methods exempt or even forbid researchers from examining the nonrational “context of discovery.” Included in this category are the social desires, interests, and values that shape sciences, the determination of whose questions count as worth pursuing and how these questions are conceptualized and researched. In contrast, FSE significantly includes the context of discovery, so it offers stronger standards. Introducing “subjectivity” into analysis increases the objectivity and decreases the objectivism. “So objectivity is increased by thinking out of the gap between the lives of ‘outsiders’ and the lives of ‘insiders’ and their favored conceptual schemes” (Harding 1991,132). Women, it is important to add, do not automatically have access to a standpoint of women – nor is the women’s viewpoint the standard. Harding repudiated both “gender loyalty” and uncritically valuing supposedly feminine cognitive styles. Indeed, femininity itself is defined by and helps undergird the unjust gender system that feminists seek to change (Harding 1993, 59). FSE argues instead for a feminist standpoint. Even so, feminist researchers are no more able than any other group to transcend historical and cultural specificity. Concrete desires, interests, and beliefs shape feminists’ results, too. A marginalized group may indulge in distorted thinking, perhaps as a result

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of oppression; it may have its own blind spots to the oppressions of others (or to the ways it enjoys relative or partial privilege). Thus, the claims and methods of FSE are not absolute, but are couched, sincerely, in comparative terms. Standpoint theory demands stronger standards for empirical reliability, comprehensiveness, consistency, and other regulative ideals of research. Harding insists that objectivity is maximized (i.e., not perfectly achieved) by starting inquiry (but not ending here) from the lived experience of people usually (i.e., this is not automatically the case) excluded from knowledge production. Starting thought from lives of marginalized peoples generates more critical questions and reveals more of the unexamined assumptions influencing science, and is thus more likely to produce a more generally useful body of knowledge. Including women’s perspective from everyday life, given their status as the “outsiders within,” is “scientifically preferable” to the perspective generated only from ruling activities of men in dominant groups. Moreover, starting off inquiry from outside a dominant disciplinary framework requires only a degree of freedom, not complete freedom from the dominant understanding (Harding 2007). A little critical distance from “the normal” is better than no distance at all. In sidestepping arguments about purity and disrupting binary oppositions, FSE supports an aspirational ethics. This position essentially sponsors a “strong ethics” that encourages increasingly progressive agency without demonizing those unwilling to undertake radical action. This language may seem weird, if not wild, to conventional journalists. Yet, ironically, it is the moderate tone of FSE that sets up a contrast to the extremism of conventional objectivity. Stephen Ward (2009) quotes a late nineteenth century Associated Press directive prohibiting “all expressions of opinions on any matter, all comment, all political, religious or social bias, and especially all personal feeling on any subject…” (75). Too polite to point out that the “especially” deflates the “alls,” Ward aptly observes that the rhetoric of these rules is one of self-denial, restraint, and exclusion. Instead of referring to rules that generate truth, FSE deploys Kuhn’s notion of moving away from falsehoods: “Fidelity to what inquiry can actually achieve can be a reasonable standard here. Thus, we can aim for the provisionally least false of all and only the hypotheses already tested” (Harding 2006, 144). Even a marginalized standpoint is neither innocent nor exempt from reexamination. FSE potentially

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underestimates how even “starting thinking” with the oppressed can be distorting; whether because of oppression or not, some oppressed women may say things that are illogical, racist, wrong, misleading. Nevertheless, less false beliefs will be discarded when counter-evidence or new conceptual frameworks offer better ones.

Journalism Applications and the Traitorous Identity Objectivity no longer operates as a god-term in journalism, although some journalists urge a continued striving for this ideal. More often, perhaps, practitioners vaguely refer to balance, neutrality, fairness, and accuracy. Yet, the very attempt to appear neutral and value-free may be no less damaging. Moreover, as with scientists, the thin requirement that journalists transmit multiple points of view without comment, as if they have equal status as opinions, seemingly obviates their need to interrogate various truth claims. Ward (2009) points out how journalists combine three different senses of objectivity: ontological objectivity, the realist theory of truth as correspondence with external objects; epistemological objectivity, which applies standards derived from logic, perception, and canons of inquiry, in this case, journalistic methods; and procedural objectivity, the use of explicit criteria for making fair judgments, for example, about journalists’ sources. Ward is committed to the term truth. What is the point of inquiry, he asks rhetorically, if truth is not the goal. Objectivity is merely the source of standards for estimating how close we are to the truth. But, journalists appear to avoid referencing truth. Except for investigative reporters, journalists rarely need to decide if claims are true. The issue is merely whether claims are newsworthy, an issue treated bureaucratically and procedurally (Ettema and Glasser 1998). So-called reforms of conventional journalism, such as public journalism, also remain wedded to procedural definitions, equally refusing to adopt a teleological approach to journalism’s mission (Glasser 1999). Current ethics guidelines of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which grounded its 1923 code of ethics in objectivity, urge reporters to consider their preconceived views and how these shape news coverage. But this level of self-reflexivity does not address competing knowledge claims in a news story, or explain how to deal with outrageous assertions from quacks, charlatans, and people determined

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to mislead. Nor, for that matter, do standard procedures for operationalizing objectivity – being fair, accurate, unbiased, neutral. Presenting conflicting claims as if they are equally viable prompts valid criticisms, from no less than Al Gore, of reporting about climate change. Moreover, this critique applies at least as much, if not more, to coverage “transmitted” by independent, “non-partisan” news organizations. One need not make strong claims about agenda setting and about the relationship of bias to epistemology, to take another example, to connect the 1,000 interviews by journalists with one individual who claims that Barack Obama was born outside the U.S. to the finding that even after Barack Obama released his birth certificate, the percentage of Americans saying he was probably or definitely born in another country dropped only from 24 percent to 13 percent; more than half of Republicans continued to say he was born outside the U.S. (Morales 2011). Ward (2004, 2009) is one of the few journalism scholars to offer a sustained alternative – what he calls a flexible theory of pragmatic objectivity.8 He sees objectivity as a necessary restraint on news media, albeit a relaxed one that explicitly acknowledges human failings. Ward re-conceives of journalists as active inquirers who interpret the world as accurately, comprehensively and truthfully as possible. Since multiple interpretations are possible, journalists must be disinterested and not let biases interfere with their pursuit of truth. Ward’s pragmatic objectivity involves the testing and evaluation of interpretations according to the best available standards, including: empirical standards for testing agreement with facts, such as standards for careful observation, controlled experiments, statistical measurement and prediction; standards of coherence for evaluating consistency across interpretations; and standards of rational debate. The latter requires commitments to rational persuasion, tolerance, and consideration of counter-evidence. With FSE, Ward’s aspirationalist ethic avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of extreme relativism and extreme skepticism. Still, pragmatic objectivity leaves in place powerful and dominant – hegemonic – agendas, questions, and evidence; and his steps, which begin with verification in the same way that conventional accounts do, are susceptible to circular reasoning. Harding’s strong reflexivity and strong objectivity offers a different solution to the dilemma, one that affirmatively embraces the notion that some views are less false than others without getting trapped by

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the circularity of accuracy. Inspired by FSE, journalists would self-consciously demystify their practices and explicitly acknowledge that, like their typical sources, they enjoy privileged positions as active participants in the construction of news. In order to counterbalance the generally unrecognized weight of the socially dominant, Gigi Durham (1998) adds, investigations should begin from the perspectives of the most marginalized – those social outsiders whose lives are impacted by events and by the reporting of events, but who are alienated from mainstream news coverage. This more engaged journalism would be less partial than that asserted to be value free. By incorporating reflexivity into evaluative method, then, FSE holds journalists, no less than other knowledge-seekers, responsible for assessing evidence against current knowledge (and potentially their own experience) and aiming for the less false version. But can journalists, who are privileged by virtue of background, education, professional authority, and affiliation within corporate organizations, legitimately write and speak about social outsiders? After all, even public, progressive activist, advocacy, and feminist journalists reproduce traditional sex, class, and racial biases. Here FSE suggests that that we can productively betray our privileged position to investigate the connections between our own social situation and that of others. Even people who are materially comfortable can try to see things a different way. Borrowing Adrienne Rich’s idea that people can become “disloyal to civilization,” Harding proposed a “traitorous” identity. Traitors are members of a dominant group who learn to see through their own dominant consciousness in order to think from the position of “the Other” (1991, 277).9 Lisa Heldke and Stephen Kellert (1995) define objectivity as both an epistemic and moral concept – acting responsibly. Inquiry is objective when “participants acknowledge, fulfill and expand responsibility to the context of inquiry” (Heldke 1998, 361), with inquiry including all processes of generating, evaluating, and communicating knowledge. Heldke (1998) suggests that responsible (objective) subjects from privileged groups can and must understand their inclination to favor conceptions of the world preserving unjust privilege. Heldke highlights the difference between “really” marginalized outsiders within, and traitorous insiders, who continue to occupy the center. The definition is optimistic, even idealistic, Heldke acknowledges. Nonetheless, she notes, being untrue to one’s over-privilege helps traitors become responsible for understanding that privilege

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and responsible to marginalized social groups. Reporters, too, could learn from – and learn to use – knowledge from the perspective of “outsiders within.” This would involve making visible a critical, reflective consciousness, and using sources outside privileged power groups. These processes would foreground the truth claims of the socially marginalized and strengthen journalism’s objectivity and responsibility to marginalized publics (Durham 1998).

The Relevance of Experience As Alcoff (2001) noted, regular people know that identity is “a rough guide and fallible but useful indicator of differences” (69) in vision and experience. “Real” people readily understand that experience affects how we see things, what we notice, and how we gauge the plausibility of a story, or the credibility of a speaker. The notion that racial and gender diversity among a jury increases the likelihood of an epistemically sound judgment is widely – albeit not unanimously – accepted. Regarding judges, this is far more controversial. Judge Sonia Sotomayor touched off a firestorm by announcing during confirmation hearings that her experiences as a Puerto Rican shaped her views – that “our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.” Sotomayor vividly, if unintentionally, echoed FSE: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion” (Savage 2009). Non-academics also take for granted the relevance of professional and personal experiences, of work and family, to epistemology. Whether this is learned, intuitive, or enforced, people – for example, talk radio callers – regularly introduce their comments by explaining who they are by experience, with the implication that their identity is the ground for credibility. Again, scholars are divided on this issue. According to Raymond Williams (1985), until the early eighteenth century, the connection between experience and experiment demonstrated the role of testing and observation in knowledge. Later, however, experience also referred to subjective witness, “offered not only as truth, but as the most authentic kind of truth” (128). Scott (1991) takes this addition to confirm her accusation that treating experience as uncontestable evidence and the foundation of analysis sidesteps the political and constructed nature of experience. Bat-Ami Bar On (1993) withholds epistemic privilege from socially marginalized subjects, on grounds it stems from a

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neo-Romantic conception of an emotional and even irrational subject. She admires bell hooks’ conception of marginality as space of radical possibility (radical openness) and thus a source of counter-hegemonic discourse. Nonetheless, social marginality alone is insufficient for epistemic privilege; even Marx’s proletariat did not enjoy exclusive epistemic privilege. Moreover, Bar On says, multiple axes render the margin/center ontology itself indefensible. For FSE, attention to women’s concerns clarifies how diversity of locations and experiences (cultural, race, gender, sexuality, as well as by geography) is both a reality and a resource to be incorporated into knowledge seeking. The same multiculturalism and experiential and cognitive diversity that enrich science – indeed, these are as valuable as biodiversity – enrich journalism and other communication practices and professions. Although it remains a matter of judgment, FSE suggests that experience potentially enriches a community’s accounts, adding to credibility rather than subtracting. Usually FSE emphasizes this in the context of global transformation of unjust relations: Appreciation of difference highlights the different ways that oppression is experienced and structured. Diversity cannot guarantee credibility, but it maximizes its likelihood.

Conclusion FSE’s relatively strong – for the moment – approach to producing better accounts is relevant to the ongoing, unstable “daily-ness” of journalism. Discarding more false accounts in favor of less false ones not only describes journalism, but also prescriptively defends application of FSE’s so-called strong objectivity. FSE offers a social practice that journalists can use to judge their own knowledge; a warning against pigeon-holing sources and subjects; an explanation of how identity is political, theorized, and constructed; and an endorsement of diversity in and across newsrooms. That said, FSE’s suggestion that experience (and thus cultural identity) is epistemologically relevant is not at all intended to essentialize gender (or race or sexuality), nor does it guarantee privileged access. Journalists often evaluate sources based on formal title and describe their sources and subjects in terms of some ostensibly relevant explanation of background and identity. But journalists typically discount people, based on their experience. They imply that experience is disabling, and even blinding. Sometimes background is distorting, for

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example, when 9-11 victims’ families hysterically demonized the socalled “Ground Zero Mosque.” In any case, veteran reporters clearly make mistakes about sources – too readily doubting the source saying John Edwards has a love child, and meanwhile believing the Iraqi saying his countryman will welcome the Allies with roses. It is not merely a matter of getting two, or three, sources. FSE’s attention to the voices and potential authority of the subordinated and the marginalized significantly deepens the notion of triangulation. Both inclusion and exclusion require self-reflexivity and acute sensitivity to diversity when evaluating which are the more false accounts. Moreover, journalists often assume they alone can transcend experience, especially embodied ones, but they also want to set aside (“bracket” in Habermas’s terms) experiences of reporters. New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner was assumed not only by his legions of critics but also by Clark Hoyt, then the paper’s public editor, to suddenly and automatically lose his ability to provide objective, disinterested coverage of Israel when his son joined the Israeli military (Hoyt 2010a). One former Jerusalem bureau chief recommended that Bronner remain in his post, noting that reporters can develop relationships that enrich their reporting; Bronner’s son’s military service could open a conduit for information. But another Times reporter, Alex Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, recommended reassigning Bronner, even if this did injustice to Bronner, since “the appearance of a conflict of interest is often as important or more important than a real conflict of interest.” Bronner responded that he would have better insights, not more sympathetic ones. FSE makes this plausible – especially if the issue is better information (i.e., not merely a procedural question of appearance).10 We commonly use experiences to discount people’s version and to eliminate bias. Why not use it in a positive direction? More generally, FSE highlights the experiential and thus epistemological value not only of sources that are not members of privileged power groups but also of journalists at all levels and across platforms. The notion that diversity maximizes the collective ability to ask better questions and reject more false answers – and the recognition that members of all kinds of otherwise non-privileged social groups have agency – undergirds the push among news media to hire lesbians and gay men, women and men of color, immigrants and working class people. Lesbians and gay men, for example, do not monopolize

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insight in these areas – nor are they unable to “cover” straight people. On the other hand, lesbians and gay men are more likely to have good contacts, ones based in mutual trust, in the feminist and gay community. Speaking the local language, they begin with better questions. Alternative media in particular offer models for how to be transparent about standpoint. Foremost among such examples, feminist media are highly self-conscious regarding their house policies. They begin reporting from the point of view of women and draw on an enormous variety of non-privileged sources; invert writing conventions and even share control over stories with their subjects/sources; and avoid hierarchical structure and bureaucratic organization on grounds that this short-circuits self-reflexivity and community engagement. Public and civic journalism offer noteworthy, if still evolving, suggestions about the difficulty but also the potential for leveling the playing field between subject and object of inquiry, for incorporating the standpoints of the marginalized to produce compelling accounts. Heldke (2001) suggests that when more participants have more important responsibility, inquiry becomes more objective. This notion that participants can take responsibility for their actions and the values grounding inquiry offers some warrant for citizen participation. Citizen journalists are not more objective (even in the FSE sense), but participation by diverse citizens enhances journalism’s overall objectivity. FSE, I contend, addresses the epistemic challenge facing investigative reporters that James Ettema and Theodore Glasser (1998) identified some years back. The challenge presumably continues, if any investigative reporters are still around: Investigative reporters need sufficient grounds – indeed, moral certainty – to accept key facts as true. Nevertheless, investigative reporters were nearly struck mute when asked by Ettema and Glasser to explain how they know when they identified a “pattern” or had sufficient grounds to accept someone’s claims. They could articulate no principles, much less formal rules, for weighing evidence. They merely insisted that they labored to confirm and corroborate. They took responsibility for determining an ethical balance between determining the truth of pivotal facts and for consequences of publishing such facts. Otherwise, they invoked old saws about facts speaking for themselves and audiences deciding for themselves what to believe and what is right. Rather than demanding a specious objectivity, Ettema and Glasser called for “mature subjectivity”: Journalists should be “responsible for placing themselves in

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the best possible positions to know and for consciously deciding what they do know” (175). But, in the face of citizen journalism and widespread skepticism about professional journalists’ ethics, no reporters – daily, investigative, citizens, bloggers – are epistemologically exempt. Everyone must be epistemologically responsible. Of course, reporters rarely take the time for this kind of self-reflexivity, much less admit aloud what they deep down suspect they do not know. But FSE provides a way to incorporate modesty, self-criticism, and reflexivity and – or about – experience into the evaluative method. It holds all knowledge-seekers responsible for considering how their own experience – and that of their sources – could either be blinding or illuminating. They assess evidence against current knowledge and their own credible experiences, and aim for the less false version. Moreover, the process begins with discovery – with the very decision to consider a story idea and then to investigate it, not merely at the point of justification, or what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (2001) call a “discipline of verification.” As Miles Maguire (2009) points out, verification usually rests on confirmation: Verified facts are included while the rest are set aside. Maguire shows that journalist Richard Critchfield’s ethnographic “village reporting” (essentially immersion journalism) was fallacious because it conformed to what he had learned from the experts. It confirmed their perspectives. The “discipline of verification” encourages journalists to reinforce their own prejudices rather than seeking to overcome them. Maguire quotes Lippmann and Merz’s famous warning that the most important factor in false reports is self-delusion, “seeing not what was, but what men wished to see.” Lippmann proposed that journalists estimate the reliability of their reports. Maguire approves. He suggests that a self-reported estimate of reliability could improve journalistic credibility. This is unlikely to appeal to professional journalists, who both disdain and repudiate the modesty, humility, and provisional character of FSE’s knowledge-seeker. Yet, FSE would likewise caution journalists to be mindful of the pitfalls of being trained to produce a seamless story based on what they know, while ignoring what they do not know or are unsure of. FSE emphasizes a more collective, triangulated modesty, given the difficulty of deep self-reflexivity and introspection. More importantly, it is a way around the self-delusion. Also relevant to journalists is FSE’s caution that restricting research to transcriptions of “voices” problematically reduces the researcher to a

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kind of (inevitably inaccurate) transcription machine. “Transmitting” transcripts from a range of sources, even diverse ones, ignores responsibilities to and for vulnerable people. After listening to many kinds of people, journalists must interpret, and must acknowledge their active role in creating stories. Again, it involves being self-reflexive and transparent about the contexts of both discovery and justification. As Durham (1998) says: “The reflexive journalistic text would not present itself as a transparent communication of reality; rather, it would openly acknowledge the factors that went into its construction” (131). People in dominant groups can and should learn to make use of the resources of their particular position, including the powerful voice that comes with it.

REFERENCES Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2001. “On Judging Epistemic Credibility: Is Social Identity Relevant?” In Engendering Rationalities, Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen, eds., 53-80. State University of New York Press, Albany. Bar On, Bat-Ami. 1993. “Marginality and Epistemic Privilege.” In Feminist Epistemologies, Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, eds., 83-100. New York: Routledge. Campbell, Richmond. 2001. “The Bias Paradox in Feminist Epistemology.” In Engendering Rationalities, Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen, eds., 195217. Albany: State University of New York Press. Code, Lorraine. 1993. “Taking Subjectivity into Account.” In Feminist Epistemologies, Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, eds., 15-48. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Durham, Meenakshi Gigi. “On the Relevance of Standpoint Epistemology to the Practice of Journalism: The Case for ‘Strong Objectivity.’” Communication Theory 8: 117-140. Ettema, James S. and Theodore L. Glasser. 1998. Custodians of Conscience. New York: Columbia University Press. Glasser, Theodore L. 1999. “The Idea of Public Journalism,” In The Idea of Public Journalism, Theodore L. Glasser, ed., 3-18. New York: The Guilford Press.

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Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14: 575-599. Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1993. “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is ‘Strong Objectivity.’ ” In Feminist Epistemologies, Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, eds., 49-82. New York: Routledge. ———. 1995. “‘Strong Objectivity’: A Response to the New Objectivity Question.” Synthese 104: 331-349. ———. 1998. “Can Men Be Subjects of Feminist Thought?” In Men Doing Feminism, Tom Digby, ed., 171-194. New York: Routledge. ———. 2003. “Introduction.” Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. 2nd ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, eds., ix-xxii. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2006. Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2007. “Feminist Standpoints.” In Handbook of Feminist Social Science Research. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber, eds., 45-69. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Hartsock, Nancy. 1983. “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing a Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.” In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, eds., 283-310. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1998. The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays. Boulder. CO: Westview Press. Hawkesworth , Mary. 1989. “Knowers, Knowing , Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth.” Signs 14: 533-57. Heldke, Lisa. 1998. “On Being a Responsible Traitor: A Primer.” In Daring to be Good, Bat-Ami Bar On and Ann Ferguson, eds., 87- 99. New York: Routledge. ———. 2001. “How to Be Really Responsible.” In Engendering Rationalities, Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen, eds., 81-97. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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——— and Stephen Kellert. 1995. “Objectivity as Responsibility.”

Metaphilosophy 26: 360-78.

Hoyt, Clark. 2010a. “Too Close to Home.” New York Times (February 7):WK10. ———. 2010b. “Bill Keller Takes Exception to ‘Too Close to Home.’” New York Times(February 6). Available at http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes. com/2010/02/06/bill-keller-takes-exception-to-too-close-to-home/. Kovach, Bill and Tom Rosenstiel. 2001. The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. New York: Three Rivers Press. Kruks, Sonia. 2001. Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Longino, Helen. 2002. The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Maguire, Miles. 2009. “Richard Critchfield: ‘Genius’ Journalism and the Fallacy of Verification.” Literary Journalism Studies, The Journal of the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, 1. http://www. ialjs.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/ljsvol_1no_23/LJS_NOV20_ FINAL.pdf. Mohanty, Satya. 1997. Literary Theory and the Claims of History. Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Morales, Lymari. 2011, May 13. “Obama’s Birth Certificate Convinces Some, but Not All, Skeptics.” Gallup Poll. Accessed at http://www.gallup.com/ poll/147530/obama-birth-certificate-convinces-not-skeptics.aspx. Pratt, Minnie Bruce. 1984. “Identity: Skin Blood Heart.” In Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith, eds., 11-63. Brooklyn, NY: Long Haul. Savage, Charlie. 2009. “A Judge’s View of Judging Is on the Record.” The New York Times (May 15): A21.

Scheman, Naomi. 2001. “Epistemology Resuscitated: Objectivity as Trustworthiness.” In Engendering Rationalities, Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen, eds., 23-52. Albany: State University of New York Press. Schudson, Michael. 2001. “The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism.” Journalism 2: 149-170.

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Scott, Joan W. 1991. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17: 773-797. Smith, Dorothy. 1974. “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology.” Sociological Inquiry 44: 7-14. Steiner, Linda. 2012. “Less False Accounts: Sandra Harding and Feminist Standpoint Epistemology.” In Philosophical Profiles in the Theory of Communication, Jason Hannan, ed., 261-290. New York: Peter Lang. Stoetzler, Marcel and Nira Yuval-Davis. 2002. “Standpoint Theory, Situated Knowledge and the Situated Imagination.” Feminist Theory 3: 315-333. Tuchman, Gaye. 1972. “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen’s Notions of Objectivity.” The American Journal of Sociology 77: 660-679. Ward, Stephen J. A. 2004. The Invention of Journalism Ethics: the Path to Objectivity and Beyond. McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal. ———. 2009. “Truth and Objectivity.” In The Handbook of Mass Media Ethics, Lee Wilkins and Clifford G. Christians, eds., 71-83. New York: Routledge. Whitten, Barbara L. 2001. “Standpoint Epistemology in the Physical Sciences: The Case of Michael Faraday.” In Engendering Rationalities, Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen, eds., 361-79. Albany: State University of New York Press. Williams, Raymond. 1985. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed., 126-128. New York: Oxford University Press.

Notes 1  Historians’ accounts of the inheritance of the partisan press and sociologists’ explanations of the motives for moving to objectivity only add fuel to the fire. Objectivity has been described as: a “strategic ritual” enabling journalists to immunize themselves from accusations of ideological bias; an ideology responsive to post-World War I propaganda; a disciplinary restraint; and an advertiser-driven strategy to avoid alienating audiences (Schudson 2001, Tuchman 1972; Ward 2004). 2  For a fuller account of Sandra Harding’s contributions as a philosopher to FSE’s development, see Steiner (2012). 3  Indeed, even feminist empiricists have grown less positivist, more nuanced, and more appreciative of how social values influence science. To determine whether a theory is objective, Helen Longino (2002), for example,

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proposes contextual empiricism – whether it meets the challenge of critical public scrutiny. 4  Borrowing from Sartre and others, Kruks advocates an existential phenomenology. 5  The case of working class physicist Michael Haraday shows that even non-gendered sciences would be more reliable, more authentic, more objective, if the scientific community included more diverse standpoints (Whitten 2001). 6  W.E.B. Dubois, of course, described a “double consciousness.” In any case, bell hooks has similarly argued that marginalization allows Blacks to see race relations clearly. Similar references emerge in Anzaldua’s “borderlands” consciousness. Arguably, references to “doubleness” contain an overly simplified polarity that terms evoking multiplicity avoid. 7  Especially with the concept of objectivity, my discussion knits together various elements taken from multiple positions and resources on FSE. 8  Ward draws on Hilary Putnam and W.Q. Quine (the subject of Sandra Harding’s dissertation). 9  So, Harding said, both lesbians and heterosexuals can learn to read against the grain of otherwise heterosexist experience; whites can provide critically reflective readings of racial assumptions in white-authored texts. Harding later abandoned the concept of the “traitorous” social position as overheated, outdated, and overestimating our ability to identify all the subconscious interests and desires that direct our feelings, assumptions, and actions (Personal communication, June 2010). 10  Executive editor Bill Keller said the problem would be if the son rose to a commanding role or his unit were accused of wrongdoing. Ultimately declining to remove Bronner, Keller cited Bronner’s expertise, fair-mindedness, and integrity, as well as his own reluctance to capitulate to the “savage partisans” who make Middle East reporting so perilous, and respect for open-minded readers who, like Hoyt himself, can distinguish between reality and appearances (Hoyt 2010b). In my view, by the way, most of Bronner’s critics on both the right and the left are hysterical and unfair, but this is not to deny that Palestinian and anti-Israel sources should be regularly consulted.

Networked News Work

A

Jane B. Singer

little over a quarter of a century ago, on a cold January morning in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded, sending its eerily beautiful, lethal plumes out into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. For our generation, the Challenger explosion has become something of an ‘I remember where I was when’ moment. Certainly, I remember where I was. January 28, 1986, was the date the small editorial team at what was soon to be named the Prodigy Interactive Service had chosen for the first test of how its newsroom would operate once the fledgling online service was launched for public use. I was the newly named news manager, and this was my first time supervising a news operation of any kind, let alone an online one capable – in theory, at least – of continual updates. We had planned for an ordinary day, of course. We had a little television set up in one corner because it seemed to us that a proper newsroom should have such a thing. But mostly, we figured we would monitor the wires and do a few dry runs of writing a couple of national stories, a couple of international ones, and maybe a business item or two. There was room on our fixed template for 14 lines of text plus a one-line headline. The service was not capable of handling photos or any sort of multimedia input. It was not connected to the Internet – still used almost exclusively by researchers, scientists, and the military at that point, with graphical Web browsers still nearly a decade in the future – or the very few other, equally proprietary, online services around. Although our name highlighted the fact that we would be an interactive service, that meant mostly that people could – and, we hoped,

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would – shop through their computers, an activity that was at the core of our still-untested (and ultimately unsuccessful) business model. I and the rest of the newsroom staff that I would hire over the next few months saw what we were building as an alternative way to deliver information – and not much more. It would be accessible over phone lines through a computer, which was novel and pretty cool, and it would be updated more frequently than the print products where most of us had previously worked could manage. But information delivery was undeniably what we believed we were all about. So when the Challenger exploded, I and the other editors who were on hand for our dry run – being at that point still a newsroom of all generals and no soldiers – stood transfixed in front of the little TV for the first minute, then sprang for our computer terminals. I believe we managed to create two or three updated versions before the system crashed and the techies declared the test over. Off to the bar we headed, feeling proud that we had handled, kind of, a big story and in the process had managed to boldly go where no journalist had gone before: into the unknown land of breaking online news. But really, of course, what we had done was Journalism As Usual, albeit it over a new delivery platform. We saw something – OK, on television, but never mind – we wrote about it, we published it. Not long afterwards, we were doing it for an audience. Like the audiences for radio or television or print media, those people had two options: read it or not. But we soon began offering another option that ultimately proved far more significant. Although we did not realize it at the time, we took the first step toward a truly new form of journalism. We set up Prodigy Message Boards that gave people a way to talk to each other about the news and other topics of interest through our service. And then almost immediately, we started censoring them, or trying to. Because it was apparent right away that relatively little of the discourse was going to be what we envisioned it would or at least could be. It was not PBS Newshour only with more participants. It was a food fight, albeit in slow motion over a 1200-bit-per-second modem. Just like today, only not nearly so fast.

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Our focus in this volume is on evaluating evidence, and my point with this meander down my personal memory lane is that from the very beginning of the digital media age we remain in today, journalists have clung to a claim that has been, and continues to be, steadily undermined. That claim is the ability – or rather the right, professional and institutional – to control information, to control the evidence that is put before the public under the label of “journalism.” I would like to discuss journalistic control over standards of evidence in three areas, each of them buffeted by those proverbial winds – gales, hurricanes, typhoons – of change in a networked news environment. The first is control over decisions about newsworthiness, the evaluation of what is worth covering and worth including in the news product. The second is control over decisions about news content, the evaluation of what aspects of that newsworthy topic belong in the constructed product, as well as how that product is presented and distributed. And the third is control over decisions about news discourse, the evaluation of who gets to talk, what they get to say and, more broadly, what constitutes quality in this online conversation.

Newsworthiness Journalists quite literally make news. They evaluate information based primarily on their sense of “news judgment.” As many of this volume’s contributors have emphasized, they do that based on a set of deeply held, and largely unquestioned, criteria that they have been socialized – by colleagues and sources, by education, by professional frames, by the overall culture of journalism – to see as valuable. An exploding space shuttle ticks all the boxes: unusual, timely, emotional, significant … and, not least, news that has strong visuals. The violent upheaval in Syria, a hurricane swamping lower Manhattan, the red, white and blue of an election campaign – all indisputably news in 2012 by journalists’ criteria. Journalists often look for elements of conflict to separate the mundane from the newsworthy, the fluffy from the substantive, in their eyes. The kind of “happy news” covered in press releases is derided. “Good” journalism,’ including virtually all investigative journalism – the paragon of the craft, the paradigmatic form of public service in practitioners’ view – nearly always involves conflict of some kind:

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with laws or with norms, between individuals or between groups, in response to adversity or inequality. As something of a side note, journalists see the biggest crisis in news today is the declining resources – time, money, staff – available to make this kind of news, particularly at the local level. They fear, not without justification, that the sorts of things they assess as newsworthy are not, in fact, making news because the resources that could be devoted to that task either have been reallocated or have vanished altogether. Indeed, much investigative journalism at all levels – national, regional, state, and municipal – is being undertaken outside the mainstream media, notably by such non-profit, online-only startups as ProPublica or Texas Tribune or Voice of San Diego. There have been calls, such as from the Downie-Schudson report in late 20091, to institute mechanisms for extending their reach to an increasingly granular, community level. These are, in my opinion, wonderful and even inspirational operations. I ardently hope they succeed. But while they have changed the financial underpinnings of news, they do not challenge its definitional or conceptual underpinnings. Their aim is to produce the kind of journalism that all journalists wish they could, if only. In deciding what makes news, then, journalists apply particular and predictable – and, they would say, professional – rules of evidence. But those rules obviously – and given the space limitations of traditional media, necessarily – leave out the overwhelming majority of what actually shapes our days and, ultimately, our lives. In the twenty-first century, people find themselves with the opportunity to essentially create their own news media. And it turns out that while they do generally want to know about the things journalists feel are important to tell them, they have a much broader view of what is newsworthy. Newsworthiness turns out to be rather a personal thing. Three related transformations have followed. One is that people can and increasingly do create their own individual definitions of news. News is what happens to them, their family and friends, their community. News is what matters in their personal lives. Journalists no longer control the definition of news, and as a result, they no longer are the only ones making news. In a way, this has always been true. What has changed is not that we are each our own individual journalist; we have always reported

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this kind of news to those around us, one way or another. What has changed is that we now are each our own individual publisher. We publish on our personal blogs. We publish on Facebook. We publish our every movement on Foursquare and our every thought on Twitter, or we can if we choose. Control over the determination of what is and is not newsworthy has shifted from the journalist in the newsroom to … everyone, everywhere. The second, related thing that has happened is that as definitional control has broadened, the connection between conflict and newsworthiness has weakened. Personal news includes the positive as well as the negative, the events that bind us as well as those that rend us. This is true not just at the individual level – the things we choose to document on our blog or our Facebook page, for instance – but more significantly to journalists, at the community level, as well.2 Citizen journalism sites are largely about community building, something professional journalists tend to label as both “Not News” and “Not My Job.” Citizen journalists tend to have personal relationships with their sources, which journalists label as a “Not My Role.” Citizen journalists may be community activists or officeholders, which journalists label as “Not My Profession.” I am not saying, nor do I think, that citizen journalism initiatives are, or should be, a replacement for more traditional forms of journalism. But these initiatives undeniably exist, and the people engaged in them just as undeniably define news – both the product and the process of making it – quite differently. Journalists no longer control the definition. And the third related point to quickly make about newsworthiness is that it has a decreasing connection to facticity. Journalistic evidence has traditionally been rooted in the Enlightenment notion that reality is observable, verifiable, explicable, and knowable. Journalists around the world have identified truth-telling as their paramount norm, and they have used verifiable fact as an anchor for the nebulous and slippery notion of “truth.” Facts, truth, and reality have been held up as the interconnected “God terms” of journalism.3 Today’s postmodern media environment challenges the notion of what constitutes journalistic evidence in all sorts of ways. The exponentially expanded number of “facts” available, from an exponentially expanded number of sources around the world, makes traditional methods of verification extremely difficult. Information is seamlessly .

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mingled with opinion, assertion, and argumentation. It is mingled just as seamlessly with fiction in all its forms, created sometimes with an intent to entertain and sometimes with an intent to deceive. And any of those combinations not only is newsworthy to a given individual but also can suddenly “go viral” and become newsworthy to a whole lot of individuals in an instant. So journalists have lost control over their long-standing ability to make news, in all the connotations of that term. An exploding spaceship is still and forever going to be news for most of us, I suspect. But journalists are no longer the only ones telling everyone else either what happened or what it means, and they likely never will be again.

News Content We have arrived, then, at the second area of challenges to journalistic control over evidence. As control over definitions of newsworthiness have evaporated, so too has control over the actual content that is produced to match those evolving definitions. One point I have already made is that people today can and increasingly do create a version of the Daily Me. It does not look quite like what futurists such as Nicholas Negroponte envisioned back in the 1990s, which essentially was a personalized newspaper.4 The Daily Me of 2012 looks instead like a blog or a Twitter feed or a Facebook profile. It looks like apps for tracking my stocks, checking my weather, following my sports team. At a more collective or collaborative level, it looks like an aggregator such as Google News or Newsvine. But in all those permutations, news is what I say it is. A journalist may or may not have had a role in making that information available to me, but that journalist’s control over whether availability rises to the level of personal awareness has diminished to nearly the vanishing point, search engine optimization strategies and frenetic Facebook updates notwithstanding. Journalists no longer even control the content of their own stories. Not too long ago, you appeared in a news story only if the journalist put you there, as source or subject or both. Today, you may appear as a co-author, as well – or as the sole author. One form of co-authorship, for instance, is crowdsourcing. Jeff Howe of Wired magazine, who popularized the term,5 defines crowdsourcing as the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated employee – a journalist, let us say – and outsourcing it to an

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undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call … as in, what is happening where you are in Tahrir Square? In a sense, news has always been co-authored. Sources shape a story. Other journalists, from editors to competitors, shape a story; indeed, there is evidence that their influence is growing, not shrinking, in a medium where news workers constantly monitor competitive websites and constantly update their own in response.6 Audiences shape stories by their interests – interests as perceived by journalists and as filtered through their multi-layered news nets. The difference now is that this last form of shaping is direct, overt, and immediate. The hand of the news market, in other words, is no longer invisible. Quite the contrary. The story of the Egyptian uprising in early 2011 that virtually every media organization told was a co-authored one. The evidence presented to the public came from a thousand sources. Some of that evidence was biased, some of it was contradictory, some of it was wrong. Virtually all of it, as an individual bit of information, was unverified. As an aggregation of content, however, it was a compelling first draft of history by those not simply observing it but living it – and recording their versions of it. Control over more mundane forms of evidence also is shared. Think about photos of severe weather that run on local media websites, for instance. I would venture to say that far more of those photos come from outside the newsroom than from staff photographers. At the other end of the spectrum are the myriad below-the-media-radar stories that are now actively solicited by news organizations. Attend a community event? Tell us about it. See a traffic accident? Send us the photo from your mobile phone. Have some oddball area of expertise? We will host your blog on our website. Users are providing much of the evidence that constitutes news websites in part because shrinking newsroom resources make it harder and harder for journalists to do so. But I would argue that a bigger factor is a fundamental change in the understanding – both inside and outside the newsroom – of what news is and who can legitimately produce it. One noticeable difference, and you can identify it in my examples, is that news is increasingly being produced by those participating in it, whether it is the people digging their car out from two feet of snow or the people demanding the resignation of a nation’s leader.

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This participatory aspect of the news, facilitated by the explosion in sophisticated mobile technology, has a number of implications for, again, traditional journalistic views of what constitutes evidence and the norms that guide its newsroom production. Clearly, the traditional notion of journalistic objectivity is in the line of fire here, as recent studies bear out. A 2009 McCormick Foundation study, for instance, reported that community journalism is evolving as an exercise in participation as much or more than observation; the people behind community news start-up websites feel their role is to actively engage in local affairs in order to bring more meaning and commitment to what they write.7 Objectivity, at least as journalists generally define it, is not seen as particularly valuable – in fact, it is not uncommonly viewed as potentially detrimental. Similarly, other research indicates that the ability to participate in news creation and distribution is an important criterion for people faced with an unlimited choice of news providers.8 That is, people evaluate a news site based in part on the extent of options it offers for tailoring content to enhance personal relevance. Such options include not only the ability to customize content provided by the journalists but also the ability for users to add their own contributions. Before leaving the subject of changes in journalistic control over the content of news, let me say a bit about control over the distribution of that news. In a traditional media environment, both the legal right and the practical ability to distribute news content were reserved to the copyright holder, aka the owner of the printing press or broadcast transmitter. In an open network, the whole concept of control over distribution is laughable. News organizations not only have stopped trying, they have done a 180 and begun actively encouraging anyone and everyone to redistribute their content as widely as possible. Among their methods are providing the ability for website users to: * Override the journalists’ news judgment by affecting the prominence given to an item on the site. Common implementations include “most read” or “most popular” boxes on a home page or section front, along with recommendation tools through which users can signal their approval (or disapproval) of a given story, enabling website visitors to see at a glance what others think of a piece. * Highlight a story for consumption by those who have not visited the news organization’s website at all by “sharing” it with a “social

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news” site such as Digg or StumbleUpon. Such sites compile lists of headlines and links based on how many times a story is suggested as deserving more widespread attention. * Pass along a particular story to others in a user’s individual social network, most notably through the now ubiquitous use of such tools as Facebook and Twitter. Some media organizations have gone even further. Britain’s Guardian newspaper, for example, introduced a “zeitgeist” option that combines a range of indicators into a composite snapshot of “what people are currently finding interesting on guardian.co.uk at the moment.”9 A dynamic display offers an assortment of items that change throughout the day, sometimes by the minute, as stories get read, linked to, or talked about. Early indications, by the way, are that what users see as valuable may not be the same things that journalists identify. A 2010 Pew study of U.S.-based media suggests quite different agendas for social media websites and mainstream media.10 Moreover, the top stories varied widely on different social media platforms. Bloggers gravitated toward stories that elicited emotion, Twitter users focused on technology, and popular YouTube videos highlighted the curious and the visually compelling. In summary, users are becoming active participants in, creators of, and redistributors of the content of news. They are gaining increased control over the process of determining not only what is valuable to them as individuals but what they believe will be of value – important, interesting, relevant, useful – to others. Through the implementation of increasingly sophisticated automated tools, journalists thus have relinquished control over what formerly was an exclusive right to identify which stories were the day’s “best.” Those judgments rested on journalists’ socially and culturally informed guesses about what would be of greatest importance or interest to their audiences. Digital technologies, and the rapidly evolving rules of evidence engendered by these tools, mean they no longer have to guess – and those audiences no longer have to accept either the product as presented or the “play” it has been given by those in the newsroom.

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News Discourse So journalists in a networked environment are wrestling with greatly diminished control over definitions of what constitutes newsworthiness and determinations of what constitutes news content. My final point involves control over what qualifies as acceptable speech within media spaces – and who gets to decide what such speech might look or sound like. As mentioned already, the issue of who is able to speak through the media – who gets the right to present their evidence, and in so doing, to accrue at least some measure of credence for it – used to be up to journalists to decide. Sources and subjects had, indirectly, a voice; those left out of the story, or those whose stories journalists deemed unworthy of telling, had none. Those pioneering Prodigy users whom I mentioned at the start of this chapter were in the vanguard in saying – shouting – that they found journalistic control over their ability to speak every bit as unacceptable as the government control prohibited in the Bill of Rights. We actually were startled at how angry they were, though of course, we should not have been. Journalists, of all people, should have anticipated how people would feel about anything that even hinted at censorship. Twenty-five years on, most journalists would agree with the Prodigy users – in theory. But twenty-five years on, the reality of free speech continues to pose challenges to the value that we all recognize in principle. On discussion boards and in comment threads everywhere, the rhetorical food fight rages on and on and on, fueled not only by the endless supply of things to be outraged about but also by the anonymity and lack of real-life accountability with which that outrage can be expressed. Media organizations have finally realized what some of us suspected way back in the 1980s: that attempts at unilateral control over online discourse are both futile and infuriating. How, then, to balance the desire for civility (perhaps even cogency, if that is not too much to hope for) with the desire to encourage free expression? Only recently have we begun to see a tentative answer emerge, and here too, it involves an acknowledgment of control lost – or, more

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generously, shared. As with aspects of newsworthiness and news content, this shift has taken a variety of forms, and they have evolved over time. One of the earliest moves stemmed from the realization that once the volume of user comments reached a not-very-large critical mass, pre-screening them to determine which were and were not acceptable was not only inadvisable on both legal and ethical grounds but also impossible on practical ones. The response: Users were given the ability to flag any comments that they considered problematic. In other words, the responsibility for determining an appropriate level of discourse on a website was passed on to audiences of that site. But that decision only addressed one problem, and it addressed it imperfectly at that. Tossing the hecklers out of the hall may make those who remain more comfortable about speaking, but it does not by itself either enable or encourage anyone else to listen. In online discussion spaces, the ability to speak freely turns out to be necessary but not sufficient to having one’s voice heard. Just as important is amplification of those voices that the rest of us might want to hear above the din. This amplification, of course, is precisely what journalists once provided through, again, the process of selecting subjects to cover and sources to quote. As we have seen, though, that journalistic function has been significantly diluted. Anyone can publish. Anyone can speak. And they do. So over the past few years, journalists have begun enlisting users in the third aspect of evaluating evidence that I want to highlight: the evaluation of which speakers, as well as which elements of speech, deserve attention from the rest of us. Here, too, this shift in control is taking a variety of technologically enabled forms. There are new permutations every time I look, facilitated by the development of increasingly flexible “community management” software applications such as Pluck or Disqus, but they include: * Ratings of user comments. The websites of most major news outlets, and a growing number of smaller ones, too, give users an ability to click on an icon to vote – thumbs up or thumbs down, like or dislike – on a particular comment. Most then allow comments to be displayed by the number of votes they get rather than by the chronological default.

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* Ratings of individuals who post comments. On a large and growing number of news websites, you can click on the name of a person who has left a comment, see an overall score produced by the aggregate ratings of other users, and add your own rating. The score typically is displayed alongside the user’s name in his or her post, as well. Some sites also provide additional credibility criteria, such as the total number of comments posted or the amount of time the user has been an active participant in the cumulative website discourse. * Sharing and other social media options, enabling you to forward or recommend a comment much as you might a news story, as described above. Another recent innovation has been the integration of comments with social networking sites, notably the billion-member Facebook. Some media websites now enable users to comment only by first logging in to Facebook; when they post a comment there, it also displays on the news outlet’s site. This is, if I may say, a brilliant move. Not only does it publicize the news story to the individual’s personal network, as a link to the item typically is included along with the comment. But even better, it goes a long way to removing the anonymity that has shielded those posting their rants and raves under fabricated screen names for the past quarter century. When all 892 of your very closest friends will know it is you foaming at the mouth, you are far more likely to put a sock in it. So to summarize: Journalists are increasingly sharing control over news discourse in a networked environment, drawing audience members into the task of overseeing what can be said, who can say it and, most recently, the particularly thorny issue of just what constitutes quality conversation. Shifting control over this discourse joins similarly dramatic changes in control over newsworthiness and the content of news. In short, journalists have in at least these three fundamental respects stepped away from trying to control the uncontrollable – from guarding open gates.11 In doing so, they are giving up an old form of power in order to try to safeguard their relevance in a media environment in which that power has been dramatically curtailed. I started with my experience on that chilly and chilling January day in the mid-1980s, at the dawn of online news, to try to underscore the point that from the very beginning of the digital media age we remain

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in today, we as journalists have been tangled up in at least three interconnected traps. First, we have envisioned the medium as a way to tell the same stories we have always deemed to be worth telling, only faster and, as time has gone on, with more bells and whistles. Only recently have we been forced to acknowledge that there are other criteria of newsworthiness, other news worth knowing and ways of knowing it. Second, we have envisioned audiences primarily as passive consumers and secondarily as a means of improving the stories produced by the journalists, either through informed commentary or, as mobile technology has blossomed, on-the-scene reporting. Only belatedly have we begun, though still somewhat tentatively and far from universally, to see audiences as credible producers of their own news content. Third, we have sought to control and curtail audience activities that do not fit the socially constructed definitions we have created, even in ostensibly open discursive spaces. Only now have we moved toward enabling those definitions to expand organically rather than organizationally. The rules of evidence have changed. Journalists, more slowly, are changing, too. They have no choice.

NOTES 1  Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” Columbia Journalism Review (19 October 2009), . 2  Maria Ivancin and Jan Schaffer, New Entrepreneurs: New Perspectives on News (Washington, D.C.: J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, November 2009). 3  Barbie Zelizer, “When Facts, Truth and Reality Are God-Terms: On Journalism’s Uneasy Place in Cultural Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1 (March 2004): 100-119. 4  Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 5  Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired ( June 2006), . 6  Pablo J. Boczkowski, News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 7  Ivancin and Schaffer, New Entrepreneurs.

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8  Kristen Purcell, Lee Rainie, Amy Mitchell, Tom Rosenstiel, and Kenny Olmstead, “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer: How Internet and Cell Phone Users Have Turned News into a Social Experience (Washington, D.C.: Pew Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism, March 2010). . 9  Dan Catt and Meg Pickard, “What’s Hot? Introducing Zeitgeist,” Guardian (3 February 2010), . 10  Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, “New Media, Old Media: How Blogs and Social Media Agendas Relate and Differ from the Traditional Press,” journalism.org (23 May 2010), . 11  Jane B. Singer, Alfred Hermida, David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich, and Marina Vujnovic, Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

Does The Modern Trial Lack Credibility in a Postmodern World?1

Daniel D. Blinka

H

ow do we grapple with the problem of evidence in a postmodern world? The problem manifests itself in all number of settings. Theodore Glasser observes that philosophy should not monopolize epistemology because, in part, standards of truth are found in history, not nature.2 The contingencies of history, however, invite their own challenges. Technological innovations of the last twenty years have created problems undreamed of just fifty years ago. Social media, however defined, has fundamentally altered how we communicate and interact with one another. This in turn has sparked controversy over how, and whether, we should control its content and quality, a fascinating subject addressed by Jane Singer.3 At first glance, neither content nor quality control should pose much of a problem in a courtroom. Trials are all about content control. Robed judges preside over contending lawyers who advocate their respective positions. The law of evidence, one supposes, provides some guarantees about the content and quality of information put before the trier of fact. Expert testimony is sifted to ensure that “junk” science is excluded. Lawyers fire objections on innumerable grounds, including hearsay and lack of authenticity, conjuring arcane concepts bespeaking reliability. The judge serves as a traffic cop of sorts, deciding if evidence gets a green light, red light, or a flashing yellow which permits the jury to hear it subject to the judge’s directions about how it can be used and perhaps warnings of potential dangers. Evidence rules

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harbor their own epistemology, one that serves the prime goal of the modern trial, namely, to arrive at the truth. It cannot be gainsaid that these evidence rules are not a science of proof; rather, they filter the information we permit the lay jury to hear. The rules are mostly about trying to control the jury’s thinking and decision-making. Yet these very same rules draw heavily from popular thinking about the accuracy of evidence in nearly all walks of life outside the courtroom. There is, then, a symbiotic relationship between evidence rules and popular culture; the former draws from the latter’s marrow. Its debt to popular culture to one side, law’s content control is less encompassing than advertised and its epistemology more unsettled than we would like. Neither issue is as seriously studied nor as comprehensively examined as it should be. It does not seem quite good enough to say, as courts often do, that the “credibility” of witnesses is subject to whatever “weight” the jury gives it. Although one answer to our question about how we address the problem of evidence in the twenty-first century may be to just ignore the question, it is both surprising and troubling that the legal profession does largely that. It is surprising because the modern trial is justly praised as a rigorous search for the truth in both the legal and popular culture. Such a strong bulwark, one would suppose, should be easily defended. Moreover, much is at stake at trials, both civil and criminal. Money, freedom, and sometimes lives hang in the balance. The lack of defense also occurs at a time when trials are melting away as the paradigm for legal dispute resolution. Recently, the United States Supreme Court underscored the troubling “reality that criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.”4 The “vanishing trial” is being replaced by an ethos of “alternative” dispute resolution by which parties mediate their own disputes.5 An agreeable settlement among disputants is preferred to a determination of the truth by a jury following a trial in both civil and criminal cases. The goals of this chapter are several. First, it elucidates the epistemology of the modern trial, focusing on the testimonial assumptions we must necessarily make when we decide that a witness’s testimony is accurate or inaccurate for whatever reason. Second, the essay demonstrates how this epistemology is rooted in popular culture, reflecting, or so the law hopes, dominant modes of thinking about how people come to know facts about events. These popular beliefs, however, are

8  Does the Modern Trial Lack Credibility in a Postmodern World? 153 themselves historically contingent. More precisely, the law drew from prevailing nineteenth-century modes of thought. Third, this historical contingency raises the issue of whether the law’s epistemology is consistent with today’s popular culture. Foolscap has given way to social media in law practice, yet the law of evidence still draws its epistemology from the 1840s. Fourth, it explores how the law of evidence and trial procedure implements this epistemology at trial. Finally, this chapter considers evidence law’s uncertain embrace of modern science and its reluctance to adapt to our postmodern world. The essay closes with some tentative suggestions for future change in evidence law.

Evidence Law’s Historical Roots in “Common Sense” Trials are hailed as “crucibles of truth.” One’s confidence in trials largely turns on how well they are believed to reveal the historical truth of “what happened.” And this is largely a function of witness credibility: Whom do we believe and why? What do we mean when we find that a witness is telling us the “truth”? These questions are important because the issue is not whether the witness is telling the “truth” or “lying,” but rather whether the witness’s testimony is accurate or inaccurate. And testimony may be inaccurate for either of two reasons: the witness is lying or he is honestly mistaken about a fact, which is probably the more prevalent reason for fact-finding errors. Evidence law, then, invokes four “testimonial assumptions” whenever a witness’s testimony is believed accurate, and thus not a mistake or a lie: (1) the witness accurately perceived the event through her five senses; (2) she now accurately recalls those perceptions when testifying; (3) her words (testimony) accurately describe her memories; and (4) she is sincerely recounting those memories (i.e., not lying). The eminent evidence scholar Mason Ladd once called credibility the “lawyer’s problem,” yet it is nonetheless a problem that a lay jury is ultimately expected to solve drawing from its own experiences, insights, and beliefs.6 The jury’s common sense is both necessary and sufficient. It is sufficient because we reasonably rely upon it in our daily lives in judging the accuracy of what others tell us. It is necessary because science has never devised a reliable alternative. And in relying on a jury’s common sense we contribute to the legitimacy of our judicial system.

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The testimonial assumptions recognized by evidence law are products of mainstream thought and culture, not some refined philosophy of truth determination or a branch of modern psychology, at least not one recognizable as such today. It is somewhat ironic, then, that when modern evidence law was in its infancy in the early nineteenth centuries, it was heavily influenced by the Scottish school of common sense philosophy, which dominated what we would now call the psychological thinking of the time. The Scottish school firmly rejected other subjectivist theories, which questioned whether one could be certain about anything in the world; rather, the Scots extolled the reliability of human perceptions, memory, and communication.7 The influence of the Scots coincided with the emergence of the modern trial and the law of evidence in the early nineteenth century. Before then trials were very short, featuring little of the procedural complexity that often mires today’s trials. Criminal trials, for example, were exceedingly brief. A murder trial might last minutes – not days or even hours. The defendant usually had no lawyer. Judges questioned witnesses and did their best to elicit facts bearing on guilt or innocence. Juries often huddled quickly in the courtroom before rendering their decisions. (This is why we have jury boxes!) And the determination of guilt often hinged on an assessment of the defendant’s character and reputation in the community: Who was the defendant? Does he have any redeeming traits?8 The historical truth – What really happened? – was not the prime objective. When trial lawyers became more commonly involved in criminal as well as civil trials, their goal was hardly a dispassionate search for the truth. Rather, lawyers poked and prodded the opponent’s witnesses in the hope that juries would decide in favor of their client. The goal was to win, not uncover some truth buried in the mists. Left unchecked such adversary scrums threatened to discredit the trial as unreliable and, worse, undeserving of popular support. Evidence law governing credibility arose ad hoc, its chief concern to constrain overzealous advocacy.9 The modern trial emerged at the same time that lawyers grasped for recognition as a profession. The trial would be a search for the truth. Judges crafted evidence rules not only to curb abuses by lawyers, particularly on cross-examination, but also to control jury determinations by filtering information and instructing juries how they should apply the law to whatever “facts” the judge decided they could hear.10

8  Does the Modern Trial Lack Credibility in a Postmodern World? 155 The law’s aspirations are most evident in the work of Simon Greenleaf in the early 1840s. A devout evangelical Christian, Harvard law professor, and progenitor of modern evidence law, Greenleaf published his landmark evidence treatise, the first in America, in 1842. The multi-volume tome remained the standard work on evidence until the early twentieth century. The treatise is filled with the stuff of lawyering: cases, statutes, the rules governing hearsay, character evidence and, of course, the law of impeachment. Greenleaf ’s goal was not simply legal rigor. Rather, he sought to enhance the popular acceptance of newer-style trials while also establishing law’s place as a science by drawing explicitly upon the Scottish common sense philosophy as law’ epistemology.11 Indeed, Greenleaf believed that lawyers were, or should become, “experts” in truth determination even outside the courtroom as well. And their tools would be the very same rules and theorems that Greenleaf elaborated upon in his legal treatise. To prove his point – he was, after all, consumed by proof problems – Greenleaf published an 1846 tract that demonstrated the truth of the New Testament by assessing the credibility of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John according to the law of evidence.12 His point was not to sway unbelievers. Nor was it to eradicate doubts among the true believers, like Greenleaf, for whom the Gospel’s authenticity was never questioned in the first place. Rather Greenleaf wrote to persuade the Protestant mainstream that law had indeed become a science, like geology, that could reliably find the truth, at least in the hands of skilled lawyers. By proving the truth of the gospels, Greenleaf demonstrated that law could reliably uncover the truth of far more mundane events. What gave common sense thinking its power was that it resonated in nineteenth-century popular thinking as well the professions and the sciences of the time. And while modern science found it wanting by the late 1800s, common sense’s essence remains current in popular thinking about how people perceive, remember, and describe events as well as their sincerity. Evidence law purports to embrace these thoughts as its own epistemology, which is likely Greenleaf ’s lasting legacy.

The “Testimonial Assumptions” The testimonial assumptions of evidence law are fundamental to the modern trial system. So ingrained are they that the Supreme Court,

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while recognizing the fallibility of eyewitness identification testimony, recently disdained any separate constitutional (due process) tests for reliable identification testimony. Rather, the Court trusted to evidence law, cross-examination, and the adversary nature of the trial as sufficient.13 When a witness testifies to any fact, including an identification, there are, as observed earlier, just three possible findings: the witness is correct, the witness is sincerely mistaken, or the witness is lying. The Supreme Court’s boundless confidence notwithstanding, evidence law, however, provides scant assistance in deciding which of the three possibilities is correct. More bluntly, the law “does not answer the question of whether a witness is mistaken or intentionally falsifying.”14 Evidence rules simply funnel information about credibility to the trier of fact. They are rules of admissibility, not rules of proof that determine when a witness is to be believed, yet they are predicated on four core assumptions about what it means to be a “credible” witness. Testimony deemed to be correct (accurate) assumes that the witness accurately perceived an event and is now sincerely and accurately recalling and describing it in the courtroom. Thus, perception, memory, narrative accuracy, and sincerity are the keys to credibility. And to understand credibility, it is important that we briefly consider each of its four facets. First, perception. Lay witnesses must testify based on their “personal knowledge.”15 Evidence law equates “sensory perception with knowledge,” according to a leading legal treatise.16 More precisely, it assumes that people acquire information about the world through their five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Eyesight is especially prized, with hearing a close second, albeit heavily hedged by the hearsay rule. Normally, a witness will testify to her own perceptions. “I saw (heard, smelled, etc.) fact X.” Absolute certainty is not required. Witnesses frequently testify about what they “thought” or “believed” even if they concede they are less than 100 percent sure. The law requires only that there be “sufficient” evidence for a jury to find the witness has personal knowledge. Speculation is not permitted but human fallibility is both expected and understood. There is, however, no sixth sense, especially as it may involve mind reading. Witnesses may not testify to what another person “knew” or “intended” to do. Similarly, it is sacrosanct that no witness, lay or expert, is permitted to testify about whether another witness is lying or telling the truth.

8  Does the Modern Trial Lack Credibility in a Postmodern World? 157 All of this seems fully consistent with the popular understanding of perception even if it carries no endorsement by any modern school of psychology. Indeed the consonance of law and popular thinking largely explains the power of eyewitness testimony and the confidence that in many (not all) instances a lay jury appreciates its fallibility as well. Second, memory. Perceptions from one’s senses are “recorded” in one’s memory. Put differently, they are embedded in our minds for retrieval at a later time. The key assumptions are that memories are stable and retrievable. Legal authority invariably describes memories in terms of “recordings” and “recollection” of events.17 That memory is stable and retrievable is in most ways the core assumption of evidence law and, for that matter, history itself; we cannot uncover the historical truth unless we have reliable sources of information.18 The law’s modeling of memory is analogous to a video camera (tape or digital, it does not matter), yet it should be remembered that common sense thinking originated long before photography itself: the eye captures images which are stored in the brain. When a witness testifies, she summons these memories in the mind’s eye and describes (testifies to) what she sees. The problem with analogizing memory to a video camera or, for that matter, a computer’s hard drive, is that such technology, when working properly, preserves all detail. The human memory does not. Here too this is hardly surprising or particularly troubling. We all remember what we had for dinner last night but doubtless few of us can recall what we ate on that date the year before. Yet the very obviousness of this observation teaches that we have a good grasp of memory’s limits. The law’s conception of human memory, like perception, is consonant with popular assumptions about how the mind works. While conceding that memory can slip and is far from perfect, most of us are comfortable recollecting past events. And if psychologists and some postmodern theorists assail assumptions of stable, retrievable memories, the law’s response, as we will see, is to lock them out of the courtroom. Third, narration. If we assume that perceptions are reliably stored in our memories for recollection later at trial, the term “narrative” describes how this information is communicated to the fact finder. Testimony is delivered orally (viva voce) before the jury – a live performance. Testimony is, or should be, largely extemporaneous responses to questions posed by lawyers. The issue for the trier of fact is how

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closely the witness’s narrative (testimony) matches the recorded memories, and in turn how accurately those memories reflect what the witness saw in the first place. Leading (suggestive) questions are generally barred on direct examination so that the jury may hear the witness’s own words; conversely, leading questions on cross-examination test the witness’s resolve to describe things one way and not another. Plainly, some people are just better at this than others. Narrative ability is usually a function of age, vocabulary, education, life experiences, and personality. In an academic setting one is familiar with graduate students who stammer to describe what they know about a subject. The difficulty may be in part conceptual (Do they really “get it”?) or more likely nerves and self-consciousness that impedes one’s ability to articulate thoughts clearly and succinctly. The witness’s word choice and delivery is often determinative of how much weight a jury will give to his testimony. Seasoned trial lawyers understand that over-preparation of witnesses that yields scripted testimony often spells disaster. Spontaneity of sorts is expected. Moreover, the witness’s demeanor is often as critical as his word choice; how he testifies is as significant as what he says. The final concern is sincerity. Is the witness testifying truthfully or is he lying? We require all witnesses take an oath, or affirm, to tell the truth in the hope that for most it will awaken the conscience, or at least remind them how important it is to be accurate in their testimony. It is also a matter of popular faith that demeanor – watching one as she testifies – provides valuable if inarticulable clues about truth telling. And, as we will see shortly, the law’s conception of “truthful character” permits lawyers avenues of attack or support that are relevant to the witness’s sincerity. Our hope is that people will generally be truthful when they testify just as in daily life we assume people’s sincerity in what they say. Yet we also know the darker side of the human condition is that all people, including us, lie at least some of the time. This disquieting, unspoken commonality, we hope, equips us all with the ability to ferret it out, at least most of the time. We have little confidence, as we will see, that science can reliably detect lies: the checkered history of polygraphs and uneasiness over recent claims by neuroscience serve only to reaffirm our faith that “common sense” and life experiences are no more or less reliable.

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Credibility and Evidence Law These four testimonial assumptions are embedded in various evidence rules that relate to credibility. Briefly, the law recognizes five modes of impeaching or supporting witnesses’ credibility – contradictory testimony, prior statements by the witness, bias and interest, defects in testimonial capacity, and truthful character. Each mode of impeachment bears on one more of the testimonial assumptions. For example, an earlier statement that conflicts with the witness’s testimony in court may show he is lying or just confused about what he saw or remembers, but in either event his testimony is inaccurate and should be disregarded or discounted. For present purposes we will focus on just two avenues of impeachment: defects in testimonial capacity and truthful character. The law posits that all witnesses have four “capacities” (capabilities, really) that affect their testimony. They are the capacities to perceive, to remember, to narrate, and to be sincere. Defects in the first three may be freely pursued on cross-examination or by calling other witnesses to testify to the target witness’s defect. By convention the capacity to be sincere falls within the doctrinal realm of truthful character, which is subject to special rules and will be discussed below. What “defects” affect the testimonial capacities of perception, memory, and narration? Drugs and alcohol may affect a witness’s perceptions and perhaps her memory as well.19 And if she drank to “relax” before she took the witness stand, her drinking may also affect her narrative capacity. In any event she is subject to cross-examination about drug and alcohol use whether at the time of the event or at trial. If she denies using alcohol, other witnesses may testify to their personal knowledge of the target witness’s drinking. In the case of drug use, an expert witness may be needed to discuss the effects of such substances on perception and memory in the particular case. Abuse of drugs or alcohol in general or on other occasions is usually excluded as inadmissible “bad” character evidence (to be distinguished from her “truthful” character). Aside from substance abuse, a defect in one’s ability to perceive may arise in more conventional ways. Bad eyesight, color blindness, or poor hearing are facts of life for many people which in turn may affect the accuracy of their testimony. A witness may be cross-examined, for example, about whether she wore her glasses when observing a car

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accident. Other witnesses may be called to contradict her on this fact. In-court demonstrations may be used where helpful, as, for example, in testing a witness’s sight or hearing. So too defects in perception, memory and narration may arise from a mental disease or defect. Some of this falls within the realm of ordinary life. A witness who knows the target witness may testify that the latter has a “poor memory.” Various forms of dementia often seriously damage memory or the capacity to describe (narrate) those memories in complex ways that require expert testimony.20 In sum, the law’s assumptions about defects in a witness’s capacity to perceive, to remember, or to narrate are consistent, or so it seems, with popular beliefs about how the mind works. We may not understand (or care about) the neurology that determines a person’s vision, but we comfortably assume that an eyewitness wearing thick lenses in his glasses should be carefully scrutinized regarding what he saw. The capacity to be sincere is conceptualized legally in terms of character. Specifically, the law posits that all human beings are either of truthful or untruthful character. Less abstractly, the inquiry is into whether a person is a liar. Predictably, this type of name-calling (“Witness X is a liar”) provokes both contention and confusion in the courts. The rules governing this practice are technical and difficult to apply. For present purposes there is no need to survey the legal domain in detail, but a brief overview is helpful in assessing how truthful character is tied to the human quality of “sincerity” while also getting a sense of how byzantine these rules are. To begin with, the law insists that the focal point is an ascribed “character for truthfulness or untruthfulness,” as distinguished from equally ill-defined character traits such as “honesty,” “trustworthiness,” or even “goodness.”21 Parties can call character witnesses to testify to their personal opinion that another witness is of “untruthful” character. Reputation (community gossip) to this effect is also admissible, but proof that a witness is “truthful” is only admissible following an attack that she has an “untruthful” character. The rules also permit any witness to be cross-examined about a “specific instance of untruthful conduct.”22 For example, a witness who falsely answered questions on a job application may be cross-examined about this incident, as may an expert who falsified credentials on his curriculum vitae. The rules also permit a witness to be impeached with his or her record of prior criminal convictions. The practice varies from

8  Does the Modern Trial Lack Credibility in a Postmodern World? 161 court-to-court. Some jurisdictions permit impeachment with felony convictions as well as crimes of dishonesty or false statement. Some details may be disclosed.23 A jury may be told, for instance, that the witness was convicted of felony burglary in 2004 and received a prison sentence of two years. Other jurisdictions permit impeachment with only the “fact” and “number” of convictions, not any details about their nature, the date, or the sentence.24 Impeachment with prior convictions, especially in criminal cases, excites grave concerns because of its potential unfairness. In what way are prior convictions related to an untruthful character? The definitive answer was given by Oliver Wendell Holmes in the 1880s: the witness’s criminal record demonstrates a “readiness to do evil” from which one infers a “readiness to lie” and, thus, that “he has lied” in court today.25 Holmes’s candid Victorian syllogism was not novel; rather it captured the prevailing thinking both in the courtrooms and in popular thinking. The nineteenth-century conception of character, steeped in that period’s commitment to a “moral science” influenced by Scottish common sense and faculty psychology, not to mention a heavy dose of Protestant theology, coincided with the emergence of modern evidence law.26 It remains vibrant today not only in trials but in popular culture as well. Reference letters for jobs or graduate schools serve much the same purpose as a character witness. Our society uses “traits” to sort people for a variety of purposes. And while modern psychology has largely abandoned “trait” psychology, it is just one more reminder of the gulf that separates some areas of scientific thinking from that in law and popular culture.

Common Sense and the Limits of Science in the Courtroom Science’s effect on evidence law and trial proof is decidedly uneven. Findings that contradict the common law testimonial assumptions, particularly social scientific or psychological evidence directed at popular “misconceptions,” effectively diminishes the jury’s role in fact finding and threatens the trial’s legitimacy. Modern insights about the frailties of eyewitness identification or the phenomena of false confessions, for example, are usually excluded on grounds that the jury (somehow) intuitively grasps such things or that the lawyers can

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expose the weaknesses without expert witnesses. Polygraphs (lie detectors) of various iterations have been used in investigations for almost a century, yet have received a chilly reception in the courtroom. On occasion courts have gingerly permitted their use only to slam the door on them later because they are unduly confusing, insufficiently helpful, and a waste of time.27 Hypnosis, whether used to refresh or to “recover” memories, has also been scorned by most courts (and by many scientists as well).28 More recently, advances in neuro-imaging technology purports to measure truthfulness (and much else), we are told, in ways more reliable than polygraphs. One gets a good sense of these developments in “neurolaw” from papers like these:  Brain Scans as Evidence: Truths, Proofs, Lies, and Lessons”29  “Brushing Up Our Memories: Can We Use Neurotechnologies to Improve Eyewitness Memory?”30 While the topic is complex, for present purposes we should take note that often the real problem with such “insights” is that they conflict with popular thinking and reduce juries to spectators if not render them altogether useless. One prominent psychologist, critical of “repressed” memory cases, has declared that there is “no reliable way to listen to a memory report and judge whether it is true or false.”31 Proclamations like this threaten the taproot of the trial, not to mention history itself. The risk here is that trial law will become colonized by experts who will tell juries which witnesses to believe and why, thereby undermining the jury’s autonomy to determine credibility and the legitimacy of trials themselves. Ironically, the jury is reduced to deciding only among the credibility experts themselves. The law has rebuffed such threats in the past. We have time for only one example of law’s tempestuous relationship with psychology. In the late 1920s the brilliant Robert Maynard Hutchins, then in his 20s, was a professor and dean at Yale Law School, where he taught and wrote about evidence law. Hutchins paired himself with a psychologist, Donald Slesinger, to write a series of influential articles highly critical of evidence law based on the insights of the best psychological thinking of the time. In a 1926 address to the American Associations

8  Does the Modern Trial Lack Credibility in a Postmodern World? 163 of Law Schools, Hutchins asserted that law should look to the “objective psychologists” to “extricate the administration of the law” from its doctrinal swamp. Failure to do so augured legal doom, as the lawyers would “abdicate our position as specialists in human behavior, reaffirm the traditional conservatism of the profession, and permit the rules of evidence to recede still further from reality.”32 Hutchins’ articles are still reverently cited today, over 80 years later. Yet Hutchins’ iconoclasm was short lived. After leaving Yale to head the University of Chicago, Hutchins virtually recanted in an address published in the very first volume of the University of Chicago Law Review. He regretted that law schools had reached out to social scientists for answers to legal problems. Hutchins credited them with exposing “the masses of social, political, economic, and psychological data which lay hidden in the cases.” Nonetheless, while “the social scientists seemed to have a great deal of information, we could not see and they could not tell us how to use it.” Hutchins then turned to evidence law: For example, the law of evidence is obviously full of assumptions about how people behave. We understood that the psychologists knew how people behave. We hoped to discover whether an evidence case was “sound” by finding out whether the decision was in harmony with psychological doctrine. What we actually discovered was that psychology had dealt with very few of the points raised by the law of evidence; and that the basic psychological problem of the law of evidence, what will affect juries, and in what way, was one psychology had never touched at all.33

Hutchins closed with “the hope of some day striking some mutual sparks” between law and psychology. Today there are sparks, but few flames.

Concluding Thoughts:

Victorian Culture & the Post Modern World Evidence law assumes that its testimonial assumptions, as well as the rules governing credibility, remain consonant with current popular thought despite their nineteenth-century origins. The embrace of common sense, as we have seen, helps explain both the modern trial’s legitimacy and popularity. Yet there is tension. The public’s faith in the five senses and stable memories seems safe enough at present, but

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what about quaintly Victorian notions regarding one’s “character trait for truthfulness”? Evidence that any human being has lied on a prior occasion (at least!) seems weirdly obvious and not the least helpful in determining her credibility today, so why permit it? So too the linkage between a witness’s prior criminal convictions and “truthful character” seems a bit oblique and likely to give way to ostensibly forbidden inferences, such as the obvious one that convicted criminals are likely guilty for that reason alone. To the extent that the public has outgrown, or abandoned, some ideas still woodenly embraced by law, these rules need to be rethought. And then we have the phenomena of the “vanishing trial,” which risks relegating the trial jury to history’s museum of curiosities while breeding a generation of lawyers lacking fundamental trial skills and adept only at settlement. How does a fledgling trial lawyer learn how to distinguish among strong and weak cases without trying some herself? How else does a lawyer develop the skills needed to support or attack a witness’s credibility? And will public confidence erode if our justice system, civil and criminal, lives only by the “deal”? The problem is particularly acute in the criminal justice system. For example, prosecutors lacking trial skills may eschew charges in a circumstantial case because they lack the skill or experience to try a tough case, or perhaps have no idea whether it is provable in the first place. At the other extreme, a prosecutor may overcharge a case to leverage a guilty plea to a lesser charge by a defendant understandably reluctant to risk all at trial. Unseasoned criminal defense counsel are unlikely to recommend a client take a marginal case to trial. Similar issues arise in the civil justice system, where lawyers’ enchantment with expensive discovery and motion practice may mask a reluctance, or even inability, to try cases in the first place. Raising issues is easy; finding answers is hard. Evidence law is understandably reluctant to substitute its common sense underpinnings for the infirmities of modern psychology. Nonetheless, it should strive to better understand its roots in mainstream thought and popular culture if only to better appreciate where and how cultural changes, and psychology’s insights, might assist credibility determinations without undermining the trial’s legitimacy. First, the trial itself must change, at least incrementally. Trial judges should play a more active role in the proof process, particularly to assure that juries are provided with information critical to assessing the accuracy of lay testimony. Both

8  Does the Modern Trial Lack Credibility in a Postmodern World? 165 perjury and mistaken testimony are “wrong” and distort fact-finding, yet present rules and procedures are more oriented toward exposing the liar than the innocently mistaken witness. Second, other rules need to be rethought. If there is no popular consensus about what constitutes a “truthful character,” it is difficult to justify the plethora of rules that regulate evidence about such a dubious concept in the first place. The human propensity to lie is simply, and regrettably, not in need of evidence. The key, then, is to assure that the trial’s conception of credibility remains in tune with popular assumptions. And where popular thinking itself may be uninformed or naïve (e.g., the false confession phenomena), then experts should educate the jury. We must assure that the jury receives the information it requires in determining credibility in a manner that does not undermine the legitimacy of the trial itself or the reliability of its outcomes. This is the challenge posed by the postmodern era.

NOTES 1  This essay draws from my earlier article, Daniel D. Blinka, “Why Modern Evidence Law Lacks Credibility,” Buffalo Law Review 58 (2010): 357. 2  Theodore Glasser, “Journalists, Jurists and Other Foundationalists: What Postmodern World?” Nieman Research Conference, Marquette University, Milwaukee WI, 2011. 3  Jane Singer, “Networked News Work.” Nieman Research Conference, Marquette University, Milwaukee WI, 2011. 4  Lafler v. Cooper, 132 S.Ct. 1376, 1388 (2012). 5  Marc Galanter , “The Vanishing Trial: An Examination of Trials and Related Matters in Federal and State Courts,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 1 (2004): 459. 6  Mason Ladd, “Some Observations on Credibility: Impeachment of Witnesses,” Cornell Law Quarterly 52 (1967): 239, 261. 7  Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861 (1970; repr., Middleton, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980), 29-40. 8  J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England: 1660-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 356-57, 363, 376. 9  See John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 294-310 ; Allyson N. May, The Bar

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& the Old Bailey, 1750-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 140, 204-212. 10  William E. Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760-1830 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 23-25, 114-15, 167-71. 11  Daniel D. Blinka,“The Roots of the Modern Trial: Greenleaf ’s Testimony to the Harmony of Christianity, Science, and Law in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 27 (2007): 293. 12  Simon Greenleaf, An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists, By the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice, 2nd ed. (London: 1847, microfilm), vii-viii. 13  Perry v. New Hampshire, 132 S.Ct. 716 (2012) (due process protections are not implicated by mistaken identification unless caused by police “orchestrated” procedures). 14  Ladd, “Some Observations,” 239. 15  Fed. R. Evid. 602 and 701. 16  Charles Alan Wright and Victor J. Gold, Federal Practice and Procedure: Evidence, 2nd ed. (St. Paul: Thomson/West, 2007), 27: 215. 17  Kenneth S. Broun, ed., McCormick on Evidence, 6th ed. (St. Paul: Thomson/West, 2006) 1:147, 304-05. 18  Joyce Appley, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacobs, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 198-237. 19  Wright and Gold, Evidence, 673-74. See also Blinka, “Modern Evidence Law,” 389-95. 20  Blinka, “Modern Evidence Law,” 392. 21  Fed. R. Evid. 608. 22  Fed. R. Evid. 608(b). See also Blinka, “Modern Evidence Law,” 395-404. 23  Fed. R. Evid. 609. 24  Blinka, “Modern Evidence Law,” 398-99. 25  Gertz v. Fitchburg RR Co., 137 Mass. 77, 78 (1884) (Holmes, J.) (“The evidence has no tendency to prove that he was mistaken, but only that he has perjured himself, and it reaches that conclusion solely through the general proposition that he is of bad character and unworthy of credit.”). 26  Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 29, 266. See also Alan C. Guelzo, ‘“The Science of Duty’: Moral Philosophy and the Epistemology of Science in Nineteenth–Century America,” in Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective, eds. David Livingstone, et al. (New York, 1999), 267.

8  Does the Modern Trial Lack Credibility in a Postmodern World? 167 27  See Ken Adler, The Lie Detectors: The History of An American Obsession (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). 28 See McCormick on Evidence, 864-91. 29  Accessed 22 December 2011, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=1736288. 30  Accessed 22 December 2011, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=1685789. 31  Elizabeth F. Loftus, Maryanne Garry, and Harlene Hayne, “Repressed and Recovered Memory,” in Beyond Common Sense: Psychological Science in the Courtroom, eds. Eugene Borgida and Susan T. Fiske (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 177, 190. 32  Recounted in Blinka, “Modern Evidence Law,” 370-76. 33  Quoted in ibid., 375.

Promises and Challenges of Teaching Statistical Reasoning to Journalism Undergraduates Twin Surveys of Department Heads, 1997 and 2008

Robert J. Griffin & Sharon Dunwoody

T

his research is dedicated to the memory of Victor Cohn, former science reporter for the Washington Post and often considered the dean of science writers, who collaborated on the first wave of the survey. The 1997 survey was supported by a grant from the American Statistical Association and the 2008 survey by a grant from the Communication graduate program at Marquette University. Special thanks to research assistants Kathryn Zabriskie and Gongke Li for their valuable help in the survey. The analyses and conclusions are solely those of the authors.

What is Statistical Reasoning? Statistical reasoning is not the same as doing statistical calculations. While definitions of statistical reasoning abound in the mathematics and education literature, fundamentally, Garfield and Gal observe (1999) it is “the way people reason with statistical ideas and make sense of statistical information” (207). Garfield (2002) explains that statistical reasoning:

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Gigerenzer et al. (2008) argue that all citizens should attain reasonable levels of what they term “statistical literacy,” and they take journalists to task for communicating risk probabilities in ways easily misperceived by audiences. Garfield (2002) agrees on the value of these cognitive skills for “journalists and science writers, who are interested in how to best explain and critique statistical information in the media” (Under “What is statistical reasoning?”).

Statistical Reasoning and Journalists The task of working and thinking with statistics, however, often seems to vex many journalists, as various commentaries and studies have indicated over the years.1 In 1973, Philip Meyer (1973, 2002) helped to put a spotlight on this problem in his classic book Precision Journalism in which he sought to introduce and legitimize, to journalists and those who educate them, the correct use of social science research methods in the gathering and analysis of news. In the process, journalists were urged to add depth and accuracy to their news reports by analyzing statistical data properly and interpreting the results in a meaningful context for their audiences. Some, but certainly not all, of the key public issues have changed since 1973. Nonetheless, much of the essential information that underlies even today’s news is numerical. The economy, energy, environment, elections, health risks and health care, for example, all require reporters to handle statistics adeptly. “Nutritional advice, technology, crime rates, other risk warnings, and weather forecasts all rely on numbers,” Cohn and Cope (2001) observed. “Even when we journalists say we are dealing in facts and ideas, much of what we report is based on numbers” (3). For example, a three-month case study of a daily newspaper found that nearly half of the local news stories included mathematical calculations requiring at least some basic numerical skill on the part of the reporter. What is more, this kind of story usually

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had greater prominence, tending to appear toward the front of each section (Meier 2002). Even the top news organizations, unfortunately, can occasionally have trouble working with numbers. For example, the New York Times ( January 16, 2007) stumbled in a page one story, based on census data, claiming that the majority of American women were living without spouses, probably for the first time in history. The problem, as investigated by Times Public Editor Byron Calame (February 11, 2007), was that the reporter included 15- to 17-year-old women, most of whom live with parents, in the analysis. Without them, the “majority” aspect of the story disappeared along with its page-one worthiness, according to Calame (February 11, 2007), who did some simple statistical sleuthing of his own. The reporter’s mathematical calculations were not in question, but his assumptions and reasoning were. Afterward, the Times created a vetting network of staffers with expertise in demographics and statistics to help edit articles that involve those subjects. After the 2012 presidential election, in which statistician and New York Times blogger Nate Silver accurately predicted the outcome well in advance, Newsweek senior political writer Andrew Romano (November 19, 2012) criticized journalism for relying too much on pundit quips, pageantry, and gut feelings in pre-election coverage, and not enough on what social science research and valid, independent political polling data were revealing about the election and the campaign process. Stated Romano: In recent years, social-science experiments and data-mining operations have quietly transformed the 21st-century campaign. But campaign reporting hasn’t kept up. …None of which is to say our blow-dried anchors and bigfoot correspondents will disembark the plane, at least anytime soon. And there will always be room for rich narratives and character studies. But maybe, in 2016, the smartest reporters and pundits will realize that Nate Silver & Co. have disrupted the Who Will Win? industry.... Maybe they’ll become more quantlike – more data-driven and policy-oriented – in the process. And maybe they’ll attract more readers and viewers because of it. I’d say the odds are pretty good” (24).

In many cases, however, journalists have successfully applied sophisticated statistical reasoning to investigations of social issues. They let advanced statistical software handle the drudgery of computation so

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that they can uncover patterns and trends amidst an otherwise hopeless flurry of intertwined variables. For example, reporters Keegan Kyle, Grant Smith, and Ben Poston of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (August 31, 2008) investigated whether the city took longer to repair potholes in minority areas, as some citizens had complained. Rather than rely only on anecdotes and he-said-she-said assertions, they retrieved relevant data on street repairs from the city database, which they analyzed in part with mapping software, and gathered other essential demographic data, including minority population, population density, and median income in the various census tracts. They then used multiple linear regressions to investigate which factors, if any, corresponded with the amount of time it took to do repairs in more than 11,000 pothole locations. They found that minority population accounted for a significant lag in street repair times, much more so than median income and population density.2 This kind of analysis, as Meyer (1991) explained in The New Precision Journalism, involves “searches for implied causation, for patterns that suggest that different phenomena vary together for interesting reasons” (8). “We can be better reporters and better citizens,” Cohn and Cope (2001) observed, “if we understand how the best statisticians – and best figurers – think … And a welcome surprise: You can do it without any heavy-lifting math!” (4).

J-Education and Statistical Reasoning Arguably, journalists might learn statistical reasoning more readily in college than trying to learn it on the job. However, there may be impediments to their doing so. In his best-selling book Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, John Allen Paulos (1988) reflected on some of the reasons many Americans misuse numbers and avoid math: “Poor education, psychological blocks, and romantic misconceptions about the nature of mathematics” (98). Among the key psychological impediments he listed was math anxiety, which has been studied extensively in the educational literature and which probably affects journalism students at least as much as it does others. Math anxiety is related to poor math performance, negative attitudes toward the subject, and avoidance of it (Humbree 2000).

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Another, and perhaps more basic, factor that could affect how journalism students might encounter statistical reasoning instruction is their mathematical ability. But that causal chain is hard to validate. “Here is a myth: Journalism is a career for those with math deficiencies,” said Becker and Graf (1994) in Myths and Trends: What the Real Numbers Say about Journalism Education (11). They examined fiveyears of Scholastic Aptitude Test data (1989-1993) and found that high school seniors intending to major in journalism indeed scored, on average, considerably above the national mean for all college-bound seniors on the verbal part of the test. Surprisingly, however, the students were not math dummies. They also scored at the national average in their quantitative SAT scores. More recent data (2001-2005), gathered from the College Board, revealed essentially the same results, as shown in Table 1.3 Presumably, students attracted to journalism in college should be able to handle at least basic instruction in statistics and statistical reasoning as well as do other college undergraduates. The students, however, might need help working through math anxiety.

Pedagogical Change Over Time Although we have no evidence on behalf of an increase in critiques of journalistic handling of statistical information over time, there is no question that journalism has experienced a sustained period of critique in the past decade or so, primarily from the scientific and health establishments. Calls for an educational focus on statistics and reasoning have reverberated across universities during this period (Steen 2002), leading a number of universities to institute courses and other training regimens (Steen 2007). Journalism education accreditation standards are somewhat measured on the topic, with only a single phrase “apply basic numerical and statistical concepts” listed among the professional competencies expected of journalism majors (ACEJMC 2008).4 We think it fair to wonder about the extent to which journalism educators have been sensitized to the need for such training. Therefore we conducted two surveys of journalism chairs and directors, separated by a decade, to explore that question.

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Research Questions This research project examines the various perceptions of teaching of statistical reasoning held by journalism department heads5 as well as any differences between 1997 and 2008. We expected that these administrators would provide a valuable overview of the role of this instruction in their programs. Therefore, the first research question is: RQ1: How did the journalism department heads describe the state of statistical reasoning education in their programs in 1997 and in 2008, specifically in terms of (a) statistical reasoning and the journalism profession, (b) the students’ willingness and ability to learn, and (c) the curriculum and faculty?

Some department heads may be more or less willing to promote the teaching of statistical reasoning by their faculty. Thus, the second research question is: RQ2: Among the journalism department heads, what variables in the survey correlate with the extent to which departments might reward faculty who incorporate statistical reasoning into their courses?

Method Sampling. In 1997 and again in 2008, surveys were conducted of the administrators of a probability sample of journalism programs at colleges and universities in the United States. The programs and their administrators (e.g., department chairs) were identified from the relevant year’s edition of the Journalism and Mass Communication Directory and the Dow Jones Journalism Career and Scholarship Guide. The Marquette University Institutional Review Board approved the surveys. The 1997 survey of 219 programs (out of a population of 430) was conducted by surface mail. The response rate was 75% (n=164). The 2008 survey used the same sample of programs as the 1997 study in an attempt to make the results of the two surveys as comparable as possible despite the likely change in administrative leadership. The 2008 survey, however, used both surface mail and online procedures. Four of the programs had gone out of existence in the eleven years between the two surveys, leaving a sample of 215 in 2008. The 2008 response rate was 63% (n=135). Since only 20 respondents were the

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same individuals, and since 11 years had passed in between waves, our analysis will treat respondents from the two waves as independent groups. 1997 Survey. In the 1997 survey, personalized first-contact letters containing information about the survey were sent to the sampled journalism program administrators in advance of the first questionnaire mailing in the spring. A total of three questionnaire mailings, each with personalized cover letters addressed to the administrator and with postpaid return envelopes, ensued over three months. To preserve the anonymity of the administrator, any identifying information was removed from the returned questionnaire upon receipt. 2008 Survey. In the 2008 survey, again in the spring, administrators were sent first-contact letters in advance by surface mail and by e-mail.6 The surface mailing alerted the participants to the looming online survey and asked them to fill out an enclosed form after completing the online questionnaire, as well as to indicate whether they would like a report of the survey results. They could also ask to be sent a hard-copy questionnaire instead or state that they were not interested in participating at all. Stamped, return address envelopes were provided. About a week after the first-contact letters were sent, the administrators were sent an e-mail with a web address link to the online questionnaire. These questionnaires were filled out anonymously but could not be completed more than once by the same individual or completed by anyone outside the sampled group of administrators. Respondents were tracked by the online survey system as well as by the returned forms. These procedures avoided linking any respondent with his or her questionnaire. In the following months, reminders were sent via surface mail (these letters again included the return forms and stamped envelopes) and e-mail (with links to the online questionnaire again provided). After several months, the response rate was lagging behind that of the 1997 survey. Although the reasons were unknown, among possible explanations were that some of the e-mails with links to the online questionnaire had been intercepted by spam filters, that respondents had found it quite easy to set aside electronic exhortations, and that some respondents may have been cautious about the amount of time it might take to fill out the questionnaire sight unseen, even though they were told it normally took no more than 10 minutes. Therefore, in the

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fall, two surface mailings were sent to administrators who had not as yet completed the questionnaire. These packets included a hard-copy questionnaire (two sides of a single sheet of paper), a stamped, return envelope for the questionnaire, and a stamped postcard to be mailed back separately. The postcard served the same purposes (e.g., tracking without associating an administrator with his or her questionnaire) as the form sent in earlier mailings. Ultimately, of the 135 completed questionnaires, 96 (71%) were completed online and 39 (29%) on hard copy. Had we used only online questionnaires, instead of mailing the hard copy questionnaires to non-respondents later in the survey period, the overall response rate for the 2008 survey would have been 45% instead of 63%. Questionnaire. The hard copy and online versions of the questionnaire both began with the following definition of statistical reasoning (emphases in original): In this survey we are interested in your ideas about the extent to which your undergraduate journalism students should be introduced to statistics and especially to statistical reasoning. By “statistical reasoning” we don’t mean their ability to compute statistical tests. Instead, we mean their ability to think systematically and reason using numerical data, for example:  to assess critically the quality of data;  to apply data appropriately to problem solving;  to understand the limits to generalizability;  to understand probability and risk;  to recognize when better data and information are needed for decision-making (e.g., when the data provided are incomplete or not comparable), and to diagnose what information is missing. Administrators then were asked to respond, using 5-point Likert scales, to a series of 15 statements about statistical reasoning as related to journalism education and the journalism profession (see Appendix). Other items (not shown) asked them how, if at all, they would prefer statistical reasoning to be taught to journalism students; whether any courses that teach statistical reasoning are offered, optional, or required for most or all of their journalism students; and to describe any special efforts that are being made to teach statistical reasoning to students in their programs. The questionnaire also gathered information

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about the highest degree offered and the size of the program (number of faculty and number of students).7

Analysis The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used for the analysis. To clarify the narrative of results from the 15 Likert-scaled items (see Appendix), we combine the “strongly agree” and “agree” responses, as well as the “disagree” and “strongly disagree” responses in the text that follows. Statistical tests of relationships among variables, however, are based on the full, 5-point scales shown in the Appendix, and controlled by the size of the program, the level of degree offered and, for 2008 data, whether the questionnaire was completed on paper or online. Means in the Appendix are adjusted by these control variables. Key partial correlations among variables will be reported if they replicate in both waves or if a significant trend is apparent (e.g., a definite weakening or strengthening of a relationship across time). To explore the second research question, multiple regression analyses were conducted within each wave, regressing Q13 (the chair’s rewarding faculty who bring statistical reasoning into their classes) on the control variables and on the other 14 Likert-scaled opinion items. Other analyses are as described in text. The margin of error for percentages (95% confidence interval) based on the 1997 survey is ±6.0% for percentages around 50%, and ±4.8% for percentages around 20% or 80%. For percentages based on the 2008 survey, the 95% CI is ±7.0% for percentages around 50% and ±5.5% for percentages around 20% or 80%. Percentages reported in text and in the Appendix are not adjusted by the control variables. For purposes of timeliness, all quotations from respondents are taken from the 2008 survey.

Results RQ1: State of Statistical Reasoning. The first research question concerned the ways the journalism department heads described the state of statistical reasoning education in their programs in 1997 and in 2008. The Appendix shows that, despite there being comparatively few cases in which the same individual filled out the questionnaire in both

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waves, the patterns of responses are remarkably similar in 2008 as compared to 1997. There are no statistically significant differences in means across time for any of the 15 items, and even the percentage of respondents who replied using each of the five Likert scale points is typically quite similar for any given item across time. Most notably, the vast majority of administrators in each year agreed with Q1, that it is important for their journalism students to be able to reason statistically.8 Statistical Reasoning and the Journalism Profession. At least twothirds of the respondents believed that statistical reasoning skills give students a competitive edge in the journalism job market (Q3). In 1997, about 67% of the administrators agreed with Q3 and, in 2008, 72% agreed. In addition, most (about 57% in each wave) disagreed with the statement (Q15) that the news media generally do a good job of interpreting statistically based information, such as polls and health risks, for their audiences. Respondents were more evenly divided when it came to agreeing, disagreeing, or feeling neutral toward Q9: The journalism profession does not reward statistical reasoning by journalists.9 Agreement with Q1, about the importance of statistical reasoning skills for journalism students, is much stronger among those who perceived that statistical reasoning skills give students a competitive employment edge (partial r= .53 in 1997, .43 in 2008, both p≤.001) and somewhat stronger among those who disagreed that the news media generally do a good job of interpreting statistically based information (partial r = -.19 in 1997, -.20 in 2008, both p