Famed Psychic's Head Explodes: James Carey on the Technology of Journalism by Carolyn Marvin
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What else are personal motive explanations than a way of re-shaping a complex and distant world to the mythically potent actions of a small and familiar cast of god-like actors? There may be weaknesses in such accounts as an explanation of the larger world. But it is very close to the community model of social interaction Carey prefers, despite his concerns for its deployment as a journalistic technique. Personal motive explanations are indifferent to the systemic, depersonalized reasons of politics, government, and economics. They render life as a saga. They tell tales of passion, envy, hope and disappointment. They address birth and death, ordeal and trust, initiation and betrayal.

Personal motive explanations follow a model of neighbor and family talk. Family talk is multi-layered. It seeks intimate details. It tracks the dramas of life, including marriage, divorce, illness, who is on our side, and whom we should avoid. Family talk is repetitive and predictable in its effort to create a world that is familiar and sturdy but punctuated with arresting and entertainingly bizarre stories of relatives and social intimates, especially when they are feuding. Its narratives are deeply affecting and provide some of the sturdiest social glue known to humans.

It happens that the impulse to make a complex world manageable on the close-range, intimate model of family talk is a much discussed journalistic development. This is the so-called tabloidization of the respectable press, the blurring of traditional lines of content that used to divide the prestige press from the less respectable press and its sensational sex-and-scandal menu. A classic example was journalist Connie Chung's report of a mother's claim (and who could doubt a mother!) that her son, Rep. Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of one of the big houses on the block (the House of Representatives), had once called the most prominent lady in the neighborhood, Hillary Clinton, the mistress of the big White House down the street, a bitch.This was family talk about the temperature of relations between one family in the neighborhood and another. If the neighborhood happened to be a national one, it was no less family talk for that.
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