On the Death of James W. Carey

He was magnetic. He was the smartest person in any room. He was the best-liked person you’ve ever known. Sure, he was a fine husband and father; but he was an incomparable teacher and mentor.

One of my favorite pieces to teach from is his essay, ‘A Plea for the University Tradition.’ It was initially published, like many of his essays, in a relatively obscure journal, and then republished as his Presidential Address to the Association for Education in Journalism in that organizations main journal, Journalism Quarterly. It was his first and (I think) only JQ publication, a fact that always tickled Jim, who would recall that he had previously submitted many things to JQ, but they had all been rejected, usually with great condescension: ‘the author is not ready,’ but ‘we encourage you to keep working.’ As I’ve read and reread that piece, I’ve come to realize that every interesting thought that’s been worked over in the field of media communication over the past quarter century is somehow contained in there. I’ll return to it.

One of my favorite things to do in the classroom as I teach that essay is to imitate Jim Carey. Not that I’m very good at it. And, now that it’s been more than a dozen years since he left my campus, my students don’t recognize the impression anymore. They still laugh appreciatively, however, probably because it’s just funny to see someone trying to imitate someone else.

I never took a class from Jim, but I did sit in on his seminar one semester. This was around 1990, and our campus had just played host to the conference that produced the volume ‘Cultural Studies Now and in the Future’ (jokingly referred to as the White Pages because of its size, or as the Yellow Pages because of its entrepreneurial spirit, or as ‘Cultural Studies: If Not Now…’) He had that conference and its aftermath on his mind. Like most of his seminars in them days, he’d improvise on the syllabus, bringing in photocopies of half a dozen pieces each week and distributing them to start things off. ‘This is what we’ll read for next week.’ Eyebrows would lift. Raymond Williams again. Hannah Arendt. Darnton and Eisenstein. Foucault and Benjamin. C. Wright Mills. Then he would ask the class if there were any questions, and someone would pop one. He would begin to answer, and usually you could see him shifting gears as he worked up to speed. First gear was a kind of bland offering of relevant immediate wisdom. Then his face would twist slightly and he shift gently into second gear, which usually took him back to the Enlightenment. Now the heads around the seminar table would tilt sideways, and the students would lift their pens from the paper, listening intently. What they were hearing was the setting. Then third gear, the story. When making a point, Jim always told a story. As the narrative unfolded, the pens remained suspended. Then fourth gear, the payoff, where, having built his podium out of story, he’d deliver his sermon. Then he’d pause, say something like ‘enough, let’s take a break,’ people would look at their watches and realize that an hour had passed, glance at their notebooks and see that they’d written NOTHING down, and then go have a cup of coffee. Ten or fifteen minutes later, we’d reassemble, and Jim would ask, ‘Are there any questions?’ and often the same process would repeat. Just as often, a dialog would break out. Jim’s seminars always attracted great students from across the campus, and the give and take could be remarkable. Nothing that anyone would write down, however. After the class, students would go out for a drink with their blank notebooks and have the most interesting conversations.

These seminar performances always seemed spontaneous, but of course the first hour, the apparently off the cuff answer to the apparently random question, was always based on rigorous preparation. Likewise, the apparently casually improvised syllabus always had a carefully thought through logic to it. So there was an element of misdirection to the teaching, and I think that had a lot to do with Jim’s classroom charisma.

The classes I teach at Illinois are all classes that he taught—History of Communication, Media and Democracy (formerly Mass Communication in a Democratic Society), Freedom of Expression (formerly History and Theory of Freedom of the Press)—or courses prepared under his supervision while Dean of the College of Communications—Historiography, and US Media History. This last seminar he sat in on the semester after I’d sat in on his. He took an incomplete, and later told me that things had gotten busy in the Dean’s office so he’d had to skip the last five or six weeks. This was ok with me. When he wasn’t in the classroom, I could do my Jim Carey imitation. And I wouldn’t worry as much about saying something stupid. If you have ever seen Jim hear something stupid in a public setting, you will recognize the reaction I’m about to describe. Always one of the world’s great fidgeters, he would go positively spastic if he heard something stupid. He would chew on whatever was ready to hand—his glasses, usually—and twist around in his seat, and his face would burst out in a series of extraordinary tics and grimaces. I set him off once in my seminar when I was making an argument about the commoditization of news in the nineteenth century and the importance of the reporter as a means of production. I spent a few hours afterward trying to figure out what was so stupid about what I was saying. Never did figure it out, but came to suspect that I had sounded like a doctrinaire Marxist, which might have pissed him off. He hated cant. Perhaps he failed to appreciate its ritual uses.

This year I’ve written two essays for collections inspired by James Carey’s work. One, for a ‘keywords’ collection, describes his thinking on communication history, and notes how the disparate stories and actors in his histories can hold together as an overall theory of comm. history only through an act of faith. Here I meant to tweak him on our shared Roman Catholic tradition, which he took more seriously than I do (at least I pray so now). (That was also one of the reasons why I chose the title Last Rights for a book I edited that he dropped out of.) The other is for a collection of essays on communication history edited by two graduates of the University of Illinois from more recent years, Jeremy Packer and Craig Robertson. That essay begins with A Plea for the University Tradition and discusses civic culture and the ‘party period’ in US history. It again makes a kind of faith-based argument, this time referring to the importance of a faith in the public as a ‘regulative fiction.’

This was the big question that Jim spent his life trying to answer: How can communication, or journalism, or the media (the subjects differ in interesting ways) preserve community, or democracy, or the public (the objects differ too)? He formulated this question in different ways, depending on his mood. Often he was in a Canadian mood, and would phrase the question like this—what can we ask of journalism that will help us overcome the erosion of the public caused by the media? Often he was in a Habermasian mood and would ask the question like this—how will communicative action allow public deliberation to overcome the challenges posed by late modernity’s working out of the Enlightenment? And more and more in recent years he was in a kind of Columbian mood and would ask the question like this—how can journalism be practiced in a way that will both protect its integrity as a vocation and yet prevent its monopolization by a profession? Or better—how can journalism make us better citizens?

The last time I talked with him directly was in the spring of last year, when he flew out to Illinois for what turned out to be his final visit. My colleague Anghy Valdivia, also a former student of Jim’s, had recruited him for two purposes: to lecture to our doctoral proseminar, and to do a demo recording for an audiobook project. I helped her set up the demo recording and generally worked as a go-between, and went to lunch with her and Jim. Anghy and I bitched about the office, and Jim listened sympathetically. I thought we were doing him a favor by reinforcing his decision to leave Illinois, a decision about which he never displayed any regret, to my knowledge. While he worked at Illinois, he fully inhabited the commitment to public education he saw in the land grant universities. When he went to Columbia, he fully inhabited the commitment to the life of the mind he saw in the Ivy League; he was also fascinated by the covert ethnic warfare he detected everywhere there. (Not that he was inconstant in his loyalties, but he instinctively recognized loyalty itself as a good thing, and could be a Yankees fan in New York and a Red Sox fan at the same time.) He did not waver in his keynote educational belief—the belief that journalism education was liberal arts education and not technical education, a belief that was rooted in his analysis of the history of communication, the media, and journalism.

On that last visit to Illinois, Jim told me that he was working on a book. It would be something of a textbook. It would survey US history for aspiring journalists, trying to give them the stuff they should know to be able to do their work in the most responsible and citizen-friendly way. I thought this was a great idea. I hope somebody finishes this book.

I hope somebody finishes all of Jim’s books. Once I asked him one time about his essay, ‘The Problem of Journalism History,’ which claims at the beginning to be a fragment of a much longer project. What became of the project? He told me that he’d been working on it at the dining room table for half a year, and it had gotten up to about 100 pages, when the editors of the new journal Journalism History called to ask him for an inaugural essay. He went to that manuscript and chose his favorite 11 pages (‘because that’s how much you could send in the mail for one stamp’) and sent them off. This self-effacing story can’t be strictly true, can it? It’s too good a story not to tell, though.

Previous and subsequent book projects usually went well to he’d gotten up to about 100 pages. Then they would stall. Perhaps because Jim would lose interest. He detested boredom. He loved big fat books and could read anything of whatever density or weight very briskly, and had a connoisseur’s appreciation of the complexities of professional discourses, but when something became ponderous, well, that was that. He eventually reached this point with Marx’s Grundrisse, which nagged him for most of 1983, I think.

Dave Nord at Indiana has described Jim as the kind of writer Innis would have been if he could have thought in units larger than a paragraph. Jim thought in units of essay size. He was not a book writer. Thank God. Could you imagine how dull a book ‘Two Models of Communication’ would have been? Or ‘Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph?’ The insight-to-stuff ratio of his prose rhythm is perfect for an essay.

But I’m very sorry he didn’t finish his last book, and I’m very sorry he didn’t record his audiobook. Both would have been wonderful. I think his last book would have had the appropriate insight-to stuff ratio, because it would have been written for students and not for academics. Most of his published material was pitched as programmatic, as blueprint material for colleagues or grad students to reverse engineer into the framework of their own research projects. For someone who thought and wrote so much about the great public, he wrote very little for that great public, and his best material doesn’t necessarily play well to a general audience. Once I sat in the second to last row while he delivered one of his nicer pieces, ‘A Republic, if you can Keep it,’ to a convention of the Illinois High School Press Association. The two high school journalists behind me got into a competition to see who could make the best farting noises. They were virtuousi; I’d never heard such tooting, and I used to work in a chili parlor. His audience wasn’t them, it was us. He could play to journalists, too, but in person, not so much in writing.

The written work pays off for us only partly on its own merits. If Dave Nord, to name a blameless journalism historian, had written ‘A Plea for the University Tradition,’ it would not have the same meaning—just as if he’d written Satanic Verses, no ayatollah would have bothered with a fatwa. Jim’s authorship was augmented (‘author’ and ‘augment’ are etymologically related) by his oral and oratorical persona. He was such a lovely person, and everyone who knew him liked him. He was such a smart person, and it didn’t take long for you to realize it. He was a very warm person, too. People liked him because he liked people. ‘I like everyone,’ he used to say. And he had such a voice. He was an amazing orator, the kind that just doesn’t exist anymore, and pretenders like Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson are trotted out to remind us of. So among the readers of the essays, there are two sorts: the ones who’ve heard him speak—and all of us have been touched by his charisma—and the ones who’ve just read him.

Those of us who knew him a bit knew him as a cheerful presence. Some of us would try to infect him with our gloom, but he never let us get away with it. In his New York years, though, as the Republic staggered through its Monica days and then went apeshit over Ay-rabs, and the current Pres-o-dent made sausage out of words like liberty and community, his optimism was strained. But I don’t think he ever lost his faith in the power of thought, of talk, and of civilized discourse.

Which returns me to the essay I began with, ‘A Plea for the University Tradition.’ Throughout that piece, civilized discourse is losing ground in a long war with the bureaucratic rationality of the state, on the one hand, and the instrumental rationality of the media, on the other. What prevents the unconditional surrender of community and democracy is, on the one hand, the university tradition, and on the other, journalism in its most elevated sense. His intellectual life was dedicated to nurturing the union of these two cultural institutions. Did anyone do it better? Can anyone left living do it as well?

What Planet is That?

In today's NYT article on the new owners of the Philadelphia dailies, KQ Seelye beautifully illustrates the disconnect between the most highly professionalized journalists (herself being one of them) and anyone even casually interested in the way journalism actually operates. Interviewing the new chief owner, who comes from an entrepreneurial background and whom she expects to have trouble adjusting to the culture of journalism, she opines:

Some aspects of the culture are still unfamiliar. He was describing himself as a "zealous advocate" and added, "I hope our reporters will be zealous advocates for what they're trying to do as well." When it was pointed out that reporters are not supposed to be advocates for anything, he amended his comment.

"Zealous advocates for finding the truth," he said. "They shouldn't just be willing — if they believe in something, they should fight for it."

And yes, aren't journalists supposed to be zealous advocates for finding the truth? And for healthy public scrutiny? And for fairness and intelligence in public discourse? Just as judges are supposed to be zealous advocates of the justice system, even while maintaining their neutrality on any particular case. And of course Seelye herself is being a zealous advocate for a model of professional neutrality in her own apparently cool and detached ridicule of this entrepreneur, Brian Tierney.

Anyone even casually interested in journalism would point these things out. But somehow the most highly professionalized journalists can't notice them.

How Old Were You During the Age of Jackson?

I'm in the midst of Sean Wilentz's massive The Rise of American Democracy. I will be for a few days more, I'm sure. It's a real doorstop. Not a page turner, but, just when I'm ready to shelve it, I run across an elegant description of something that always puzzled me, like the diplomacy over the Haitian Revolution or the Panic of 1819, and decide to keep at it. A very sound book. It will not dazzle you with new insights, and in fact is resolutely conventional, from its opening invocation of Arthur Schlesinger's Age of Jackson on; once again you will believe that history is past politics.

One of the reasons I keep on with the book is that it's so involved with the history of the press. Anyone familiar with Wilentz's other great book, Chants Democratic, will expect this. His history is deeply informed by and has a deep appreciation of the newspapers of the early republic. But he does not foreground them, and takes it for granted that they were powerful organs of influence without necessarily 'mediating' politics in any significant way. This surprises me especially because Wilentz is relying on scholarship by people like Jeff Pasley (a much better writer, by the way) that does just that. Pasley argues that it was the printer editors of the early Republic who invented popular politics. I think he stretches the point a bit, but is essentially correct. I put in another way in my own work. The press represented public opinion, which was the indispensable element of generating political legitimacy, and hence political power.

This is why people got so bent out of shape about marginal political movements from the Democratic-Republican societies in the 1790s to the abolitionist press. These were novel attempts to hijack the representation of public opinion away from its authorized mechanisms--the legislatures, in the first case, and the parties in the second. Wilentz comes tantalizingly close to making a marvelous argument about anti-abolitionism when he notes the earlier appearance of antislavery activism. The argument he could and should make is that the reaction against antislavery did not arise as a reaction against the RISE of antislavery (As Leonard Richards and Larry Ratner have it) but as an expression of the rise of the Jacksonian party system as a regulator of the representation of public opinion. Whipping up an antiabolitionist hysteria legitimated the power of the party press.

The other counterintuitive argument you might make here involves the popularity of the press. The political press of the early Republic was 'popular' not because a lot of people read it but because it stood for the people, or stood in the place of the people in relation to the transaction of power.

OK, I sound mystifying there. But ask yourself this. Why were the founding fathers so worked up about the Democratic Republican societies? It's because they knew exactly what those little groups could do. The founding fathers themselves had made their merchants' committees and mechanics' committees and non-intercourse associations and committees of correspondence, and they had a name for what their groups had done: Revolution. Simply existing as groups representing public opinion had been the first step in the Revolution. There's nothing so abstract or mystifying about that.

The title of this post comes from an old story about a debate between Leo Ribuffo and AM Schesinger on the origins of the Cold War. Schlesinger, the story goes, gets pissed off and asks Ribuffo, 'How old were you when the Truman Doctrine was announced?' and Ribuffo replied, ....

PS on Philadelphia.

Tom Rosenstiel made the point first:

Rosenstiel also compared the ownership to a sports team's and noted that the motivation for team owners was rarely financial. "They do it to be a player in town or to be a celebrity," he said. "They do it after they have made their money and are looking for something more exhilarating or adventurous." ('With Local Control, and Uncommon Story in Philadelphia,' by Paul Nussbaum, in today's Inquirer, via Romenesko.)

He's more polite about it too.

Philadelphia.

Today's NYT reports on the sale of the two major dailies in Philadelphia to a group of local investors. The Inquirer and the Daily News were owned by Knight-Ridder, whose stockholders forced a sale this year to McClatchy, who in turn has been auctioning off the newspapers that don't fit into its business plans. To newspaper readers, the Inquirer is the most important of the Knight-Ridder newspapers, and, in the days when prestige counted for something in the industry, would have been the most valuable property. The most important information in the NYT article by KQ Seeley comes at the end:

Knight Ridder's profit margin in 2004 was 19.3 percent, about average for the industry. Morgan Stanley, which examined the company before its sale, said the profit margin in Philadelphia was 9 percent, while company executives said it was somewhat higher, even with severance payments last year as the papers trimmed their staffs.

Both papers have been losing circulation at rates that exceed the industry average.

Circulation at The Inquirer, once the jewel of the Knight Ridder chain, fell to 350,457, a drop of 5 percent, for the six-month period ended March 31, compared with the period the year before. Circulation at The Daily News dropped 9.4 percent, to 116,590.

The average circulation loss for the industry was 2.5 percent.

In other words, even with the falling circulation, and taking significant one-time losses, both newspapers together turned a fair profit last year; no doubt without the one-time losses, the Inquirer's profit was about the industry average, approaching 20%. Why doesn't McClatchy want this newspaper?

The group buying it consists of ten local owners, mostly businesses, with the lead buyer being an active Republican and someone news professionals are wary of. Wouldn't it be nice if the journalists themselves could buy up properties like this? (I'd include the Sun-Times, which is always on the market somehow) Wouldn't it be nice if some kind of public entity could make that possible? These owners are going to treat the paper either like a sports franchise--an ego trip occasion--or like a subsidiary to their main businesses; I predict it will be on the market again soon. Pay attention to the countries where newspapers still work!

Coffee and Newspapers.

Norway leads the world in per capita consumption of newspapers and, they tell me, coffee. I'm willing to believe both these things. Now I gotta wonder why.

Not about coffee. There are two seasons in Norway: the dark season and the light season. In the light season, it's daylight for eighteen to twenty hours, and you never get enough sleep, so you want to keep strong coffee at hand. In the dark season, it's correspondingly dark, and cold, and you want to keep strong coffee at hand.

But what about newspapers? Norway can't possibly be a world leader in the production of NEWS, and the newspapers sort of show that. There just isn't enough politics or crime, most days, to fill a good newspaper, and there aren't enough celebrities or spectacles either.

But there are plenty of READERS. It's a nation of tireless readers--cf comments on the dark season--and the newspapers are rather literate by world standards. Hallin and Mancini, in their book Comparing Media Systems, note that there is a very clear correlation between levels of newspaper readership today and levels of literacy at the end of the nineteenth century. An interesting fact.

There's also plenty of MONEY. That's because of the general wealth of the country and because of the way the social compact distributes it. One of the ways it distributes wealth is in the form of subsidies to newspapers.

But my colleague at Bergen Martin Eide remarks that it's also the invention in the past thirty years of a hybrid journalism that combines tabloid forms with sophisticated cultural and political commentary. Similar formal innovations seem to me also to be the reason for the vibrancy of news media in the younger democracies of southen Europe, like Italy and Spain, which still have far lower levels of readership.

Now this formula is exportable. Are media in the US paying attention? I think not, and I think the reason is their far greater dependence on advertising income. For them, more readers doesn't necessarily mean more money or more stability.

Instead, US newspapers innovate in this direction by spinning off free youth papers, like the Chicago Tribune's ineffable RedEye. This ain't innovation as much as it's line extension.

Net neutrality again.

One feature of a corrupt public sphere is sloganizing. As in 'she's a tax and spend liberal.' Or as in 'we tried throwing money at the problem.' So in a complex debate like the one about net neutrality, it's interesting to see the jockeying over which side gets to claim 'freedom' in some fashion in its slogans. I'm rooting for the good guys, of course, who are calling net neutrality 'the internet's first amendment.' This encapsulates the argument nicely.

It also begs a question about the first amendment. It has happened that the first amendment, which originally was meant to protect the rights of ordinary citizens to participate in the public sphere, has come to be owned by 'the press,' which wields in like a fetish.

Or, to paraphrase Anatole France, the majestic equality of first amendment law, which prevents the government from infringing on the right of the poor as well as the rich to sell your children Disney products.

But, like I say, I'm just dabbling with this one, and not following it closely. It would make a good study in the politics of the social contruction of a technological system.

The blogosphere's power and net neutrality.

I've been silent for a couple of weeks, dealing with departmental politics and learning to read Norwegian newspapers. More on these shortly, perhaps. But at the same time I've been paying casual attention to the debate about net neutrality in the blogosphere.

Net neutrality is exactly the kind of issue that the blogosphere is best suited for. It is a natural test of the capacities of the blogosphere for deliberation and policy influence. It might be fun to do a formal study of it. Is anyone working on that?

Here's my take. It's an issue that suits the experiences and enthusiasms of bloggers. We all know something about the vagaries of internet access, and most of us have enough history with the web to remember its less stratified days and be able to project a far more stratified future. Furthermore, most bloggers, or at least most political bloggers, have an instinct about the web as a public space. So just in terms of motivation and personal interest, the concept of net neutrality means a lot to most of us before we even bother to learn what exactly it means.

But it's also the kind of issue where the expert knowledges that circulate in the blogosphere readily come into play. It's similar to Rathergate, where suddenly you heard from a lot of people who knew a lot about the IBM Selectric typewriter. This allows the complexities of the issue to overtake initial sloganeering.

Bloggers have taken sides, but not strictly along party lines--another of the signal features of blogosphere discourse at its best. Some lefties maintained their neutrality, and some righties showed great suspicion of the corporate interests at play. The issue touches a bedrock libertarianism and egalitarianism that the space and technology of blogging cultivate.

But as the debate has progressed, the left-right lines have reformed, I think. Lefties who were once agnostic are now persuaded, for instance. And the lobbying machinery of the net has swung into action.

As the blogosphere's discussion has turned from deliberation to mobilization, has its influence changed? About this I'm not sure. Perhaps its influence was always going to be, in the final analysis, just another form of lobbying. This would indicate that it's not a truly new public space, and that it has influence only when it works through the old channels of phone calls to Congressional reps, or cups of coffee with staffers.

Thinking this through over the next few days....

The New NYT web site.

I wrote a few years ago that the web has deformed newspapers. By deformed I meant specifically that it had taken away the form of the news, particularly the overall form, the mapping of the world that both a daily newspaper front page and a network news show execute. On the web, the hierarchy of stories is muted, the interplay of items on the page is eliminated, and the voice of the newspaper is much harder to hear. Same, but less so, with broadcast news outfits.

For years the Times has had all its matter (except the ads, which I don't read anyway) up on the web, and I read it often enough in that fashion, though I far prefer the paper edition. When I read the web version, I spend about 12 minutes with it; on the paper edition it's three or four times as much time I'll spend and I'll come away feeling like I've engaged in an important informational ritual. I'll feel in the know.

Not with the old web version. From time to time I would try to piece together the shape of the print newspaper, but without much luck. It was like radio to me. Headlines.

With the new version, the first thing I noticed was how much easier it is to draw up the content of the printed version in roughly the same form as in the print paper. It's still headlines, but it's the right ones. The second thing I noticed is how much friendlier the home page is. It begins to give some of the form back to the news. It's still not there, but it's a great leap forward.

The other interesting thing is the flirtation with blogging. I've been saying in lectures here and there that the new tools of the news (blogging's one of them) have not yet been turned into a "journalism." This is not to engage in the argument about whether blogging is journalism. Of course, why not? It's just to say that the rules of blog/journ have not yet been formulated. Now the times is going to do it. I spoke with one of their correspondents who'd been recruited for the blog experiment a few months ago. (He insisted that his thing was a website, not a blog, and of course, why not?) I asked him what kinds of journalistic standards would govern NYT's bloggers. He said they said they were open to discussion. So let's see. The outcome is going to be the invention of a journalism for bloggers; there's no doubt about that. But if it's going to work, it'll have to bless the subjectivity of the blogger, which is the whole point of the genre.

The Press is Biased toward Scandal.

But apparently only some kinds of scandal. There is a big splash over a Kennedy's car wreck today, but relatively little over an unfolding corruption scandal that has tracks leading deep into the woods of the intelligence community. Josh Marshall makes the argument:

And, while the Kennedy story is 'newsy' it doesn't really have any greater policy implications. And the public trust implications are minor. The Wilkes-Watergate-Hooker story, on the other hand, is both. It's salacious, which the press loves. And it's also directly tied to crooks ripping off taxpayers, probably allowing our service members abroad to have shoddy equipment or defense dollars going to worthless projects.

So is it that the press is just not willing to invest in the more complex story? With the Kennedy scandal, the story comes pre-packaged, and you just fill in the names. With the Hookergate story, you would have to actually crib a lot of the material from Talkingpointsmemo. No, seriously, you would have to educate your readers and viewers. It's not that the press isn't willing to do that; the press doesn't seem to have the capacity to do that. It takes another arm of publicity to cultivate the audience in the first place, perhaps.

Or there's the other argument. The press doesn't seem highly motivated to get these Republican crooks, for whatever reason. Not as intellectually satisfying, but not to be dismissed out of hand.