The Socially Responsible Existentialist:
A Normative Emphasis for Journalists
in a New Media Environment
Forthcoming from Jane in Journalism Studies

Who is a journalist?

Historically, journalists have been defined mainly by professional practices and processes. But in today’s media environment, that approach no longer works.

A gatekeeper? There is no gate any more.
A disseminator of timely info? Who isn’t?
Someone whose credibility rests on balance and fairness? Closer, except no one seems to be believe that journalists are credible, balanced or fair.

A better definition might seek to connect journalistic production to the individual producer (an existential approach) and to connect that producer to the “audience” (a socially responsible approach).

The central emphasis of existentialism is on concrete individual existence and, by extension, on moral individualism, subjectivity, personal choice and commitment. We freely choose to act, and we are personally responsible for the actions we take.

Social Responsibility Theory (SRT) suggests that journalists are responsible to the public, which has a moral right to be well-served by its press. Journalists serve that public best by adhering to certain performance standards, including being truthful, comprehensive and fair. They must move beyond strict objectivity to help the public learn “the truth about the facts.”

Contemporary communitarians and other advocates of civic journalism have interpreted SRT to suggest that journalists should actively work to bring about civic transformation through audience empowerment.

Journalists have turned to professional normative guidelines such as the SPJ Code of Ethics for help with the inherent conflict between personal freedom and social responsibility. The Code urges journalists to seek truth, minimize harm, remain independent -- and, a controversial addition in 1996, be accountable.

With the addition, the organization formally recognized an underlying ideology of all professions: that autonomy is valuable because it provides a means of better serving the public interest.

But since 1996, the journalist’s environment has undergone rapid and profound change.The current media environment is one in which anyone can publish anything, instantly and to a potentially global audience.

The profusion of information, the resulting search for trustworthy news, and the two-way nature of the Internet are among the attributes suggesting a need to rethink who might be considered a journalist and what expectations of such a person might be reasonable.

The definition of a journalist becomes normative rather than practical: Someone who takes personal responsibility for safeguarding the public trust.

Challenges can be identified on both practical and theoretical levels:

Blogs offer one practical challenge. If there’s one thing bloggers have, it’s existential independence: They define themselves solely through what they write and revel in the notion of personal empowerment.

Bloggers may choose to be accountable to readers or other bloggers. Or not. Despite the interactivity and “transparency” of the format, they ultimately are unconstrained by obligations to anyone other than themselves.

Blogs are part of a trend toward overtly partisan media.

As both the news hole and the number of media “channels” have gone from severely limited to virtually unlimited, the media audience has splintered. The economic benefits of talking, as loudly and combatively as possible, about the news rather than gathering and processing it have become obvious.

Journalists (too often among the verbal combatants themselves) who seek to appeal to a general rather than a niche audience -- one with a chance to work toward the compromise and consensus on which democracy rests -- can do so only by choosing to adhere to a sense of social responsibility.

At a theoretical level, challenges arise from (among other conceptualizations of the role of the journalist) related ideas of gatekeeping and agenda-setting.

In today’s media environment, gatekeeping is not a matter of keeping an item out of circulation. It is a matter of vetting items for their veracity and of placing them within the broader context that is easily lost under the daily tidal wave of “new” information.

Agenda-setting is not a matter of identifying what information to think about. It is a matter of identifying what information to trust.

Journalists in such an environment become not so much gatekeepers as sense-makers, and not so much agenda-setters as interpreters of what is both credible and valuable.

But does it really matter who is defined as a journalist or how such a definition is constructed? As long as we see information as a public good central to the functioning of a democratic society, yes, it does.

In a traditional media environment, the primary concern of journalists has been to make information available. Today, information is in overabundant supply. The need to distinguish based on quality, rather than the mere availability, gains precedence.

Value lies in information people can trust. That trust is best established and nurtured by those with an existential commitment to social responsibility.