Famed Psychic's Head Explodes:
James Carey on the Technology of Journalism
by Carolyn Marvin
-5-
So how have things come to this? Carey's portrait is intended to
show that the contemporary national press is ideologically rootless, and
therefore incoherent. To say that a press must be ideological to be
coherent is to strike at the heart of journalistic norms of an
independent truth about the world. It implies that there is only the
truth authorized by the group to which one belongs. This is the truth
that makes a group and keeps it intact. Toward their group and its
truth, members feel bonds of emotion and loyalty. Toward other groups
these feelings will be strikingly different. The idea that emotions are
more compelling than facts as a way of keeping groups together is deeply
antithetical to professional journalism. The Enlightenment notion of
reason, on which these professional norms are based, assumes that group
loyalties are divisive, and emotions connected to them should be
overcome. Reason is the enemy of emotion. It is certainly not an
instrument for every group to shape differently to its own history and
experience.
Still, the impulse to communicate remains deeply group-oriented
and social, and since emotion may be the most attended to of all group
guides about the importance of things, the impulse to communicate has
its strong emotional components as well. And here lies an explanation
for the tenacity of the journalistic techniques Carey finds troubling.
There is a strong group-making impulse at work to make even
technologically engineered communities cohere. For every technique
journalists invent to deny group loyalties, other techniques re-create
them. If belonging to a community makes life coherent, we should not be
surprised by backdoor efforts to re-construct feelings of belongingness
banished by disciplinary codes of professionalism. The journalistic
creation of villains and heroes, of morality plays, of fabulous dangers
and exalted victories, allows us to revel in the satisfaction of
subscribing, if only briefly, to a community of like-minded persons who
also are indignant, hopeful, devastated or triumphant at the prospects
laid out before them.
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