Famed Psychic's Head Explodes:
James Carey on the Technology of Journalism
by Carolyn Marvin
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"The Communications Revolution and the Professional Communicator"
was written in the late 1960s. It departs from more conventional
accounts of the period that depict journalism as a kind of scientific
experiment in search of truth, gradually improving its tools and testing
its results over time. Still other accounts from this era picture
journalism as a literary genre, a popular art possessed of a moral
purpose, which is also the discovery of truth. Carey sees journalistic
technique more as an arena in which competing groups lay claim to
different ideas about what truth is. Through media representations,
groups jockey for status around these ideas, and so create themselves.
Presciently, he used a relatively hidden group, lesbians and gays,
inhibited by social mistreatment from publicly identifying themselves,
to illustrate how a previously invisible group could assemble and
constitute itself through media. The subsequent rise of the gay rights
movement through media representation is a textbook case of a group
pitting its own self-images against those prevailing in mainstream
media, and exercising tangible influence over them.
To discuss journalism in terms of groups instead of measuring it
against a true account of the world was an unusual move. It was even
subversive, since the first law of professional journalism is that its
offerings ought not reflect any group's worldview. Exactly how messages
create or undo groups is the concern of Carey's second essay, written
twenty years later than the first. The title, "The
Dark Continent of American Journalism," contrasts the sunny, rational
ideology of professional journalism as a technique of revelation and
discovery to the messy, vast and uncharted terrain beneath reported
events. Carey argues that journalism generally fails to map this terrain
in its presentation of the world. Who, what, when, and where are
questions for sunny rationality. How and why lurk at a deeper, less
accessible level. They constitute the moral skeleton of the narrative
function. Carey found them largely missing in contemporary journalism.
His concerns were directed to the so-called prestige press, the
term that is sometimes given to the elite national press and its
imitators. But there is more to the metaphor of a dark continent. It
refers not only to a terrain, but in an indirect way to the tribes that
live on it. Tribal societies were long defined as groups whose social
organization depends more on ritual than technology. Carey's metaphor of
the dark continent suggests that reportorial techniques are a kind of
ritual, both for members of the journalistic tribe and those who observe
their efforts. Like technology, ritual is a subject that has fascinated
James Carey, and he has often written about it. Like technology, ritual
is a cultural blueprint for maintaining communities.
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