History
In the 1920s, before the notion of public journalism was developed, there was the famous debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey over the role of journalism in a democracy. Lippmann viewed the role of the journalist to be simply recording what policy makers say and then providing that information to the public. In opposition to this, Dewey defined the journalist's role as being more engaged with the public and critically examining information given by the government. He thought journalists should weigh the consequences of the policies being enacted. Dewey believed conversation, debate, and dialogue were what democracy was all about and that journalism has an important piece of that conversation.
Decades later Dewey's argument was further explored by Jay Rosen and Davis Merritt, who were looking at the importance of the media in the democratic process. In 1993, Rosen and Merritt formed the concept of public journalism. In their joint "manifesto" on public journalism that was published in 1994, Rosen explains that "public journalism tries to place the journalist within the political community as a responsible member with a full stake in public life. But it does not deny the important difference between journalists and other actors including political leaders, interest groups and citizens themselves...In a word, public journalists want public life to work. In order to make it work they are willing to declare an end to their neutrality on certain questions – for example: whether a community comes to grips with its problems, whether political earns the attention it claims.”
Read more about this topic: Civic Journalism
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)