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Phenomenology of Journalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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In a previous essay, the authors attempted to define, in phenomenological terms, the artistic and critical attitudes.
The artistic attitude was seen as the attempt to create the image of a total world, which could be enjoyed or viewed in terms of an attitude of everyday life; that is to say, that the created image was so all-encompassing, so total, and so complete, of a concreteness and vividness, such that the viewer could suspend perceptions of all other worlds and respond directly and immediately to the world created as a work of art.
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- Copyright © 1969 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
* “A Phenomenological Model of the Artistic and Critical Attitudes,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XXVIII, 1967.
1 George Simmel, in Superordination and Subordination, Section 5, "Leader and Led": "The journalist gives content and direction to the opinions of a mute multitude. But he is nevertheless forced to listen, combine, and guess what the tendencies of this multitude are, what it desires to hear and to have confirmed, and whether it wants to be led. While apparently it is only the public which is exposed to his suggestions, actually he is as much under the sway of the public's suggestion. Thus, a highly complex interaction (whose two, mutually spontaneous forces, to be sure, appear under very different forms) is hidden here beneath the semblance of the pure superiority of the one element and a purely passive being-led of the other." From The Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated by Kurt Wolff, New York, Free Press Paperback, 1964, pp. 185-6.
2 Alfred Schutz, in his essay, The Well-Informed Citizen—An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge, formulates this problem in a somewhat different but related perspective, in which he constructs three ideal types: the expert, the man in the street, and the well-informed citizen, as three sepa rate forms of social knowledge (see the Collected Works, volume II, p. 129 et passim). The present essay on the journalistic attitude focuses upon certain aspects which Schutz developed only in passing. See also W. Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925): "Modern society is not visible to anybody, nor intelligible continuously and as a whole. One section is visible to another section, one series of acts is intelligible to this group and another to that" (p. 42).
3 Leo Gurko, Heroes, Highbrows and the Popular Mind, New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1953. "The enormous specialization that accompanied the spread of scientific and technical knowledge broke life up into smaller segments, and made the custodian of each segment increasingly important. In due course this custodian developed into the professional expert who, by virtue of his total knowledge of a single area (and often total ignorance of everything else), set up shop as middleman between his area and the public at large. His very concen tration on a single sphere at the expense of every other kind of knowledge was a strong element in his functioning as an expert." (p. 236)
4 Leo Lowenthal, Biographies in Popular Magazines, reprinted in William Petersen (Ed.), American Social Patterns, Garden City, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, p. 71: "A biography seems to be the means by which an average person is able to reconcile his interest in the important trends of history and in the personal lives of other people"; also pp. 108-110: "The important role of familiarity in all phenomena of mass culture cannot be sufficiently emphasized. People derive a great deal of satisfaction from the continual repetition of familiar patterns… there has never been any rebellion against this fact… the biographies repeat what we have always known…" (p. 110)
5 Orrin E. Klapp, Symbolic Leaders—Public Dramas and Public Men, Chi cago, Aldine Publishing Company, 1964, especially Chapter 8: "Hero Stuff," p. 217, for other props of famous characters: sweaters, spectacles, mustaches, stovepipe hats, etc.
6 Edgar Morin, The Star—An Account of the Star System in Motion Pictures, New York, Grove Press, 1960: "The actor does not engulf his role. The role does not engulf the actor. Once the film is over, the actor becomes an actor again, the character remains a character, but from their union is born a composite creature who participates in both, envelops them both: the star. G. Gentilhomme gives an excellent primary definition of the star (in Comment devenir vedette de cinéma): "A star appears when the interpreter takes precedence over the character he is playing while profiting by that character's qualities on the mythic level.' Which we might complete: ‘and when the character profits by the star's qualities on this same mythic level'." (p. 39)
7 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image, or What happened to the American Dream, New York, Atheneum Books, 1962: …"our whole system of public information produces always more ‘packaged' news, more pseudo-events… The common ‘news releases' which every day issue by the ream from Congressmen's offices, from the President's press secretary, from the press relations offices of businesses, charitable organization, and universities are a kind of Congressional Record covering all American life. To sccure ‘news coverage' for an event, …one must issue, in proper form a ‘release' …The release is news pre-cooked, and supposed to keep till needed …The account is written in past tense but usually describes an event that has not yet happened when the release is given out …The National Press Club in its Washington clubrooms has a large rack which is filled daily with the latest releases, so the reporter does not even have to visit the offices which give them out. In 1947 there were about twice as many government press agents engaged in preparing news releases as there were newsmen gathering them in…" (pp. 17-19)
8 Israel Gerver and Joseph Bensman, "Towards a Sociology of Expertness," in Social Forces, volume 32, no. 3, March 1954: …" symbolic experts may personify complexities not only for the distant public, but also for insiders under conditions which are sufficiently complex so that these complexities cannot be understood exclusively and immediately in terms of direct participant experience …In many fields of endeavour the symbolic expert is not actually a substantive expert but appears to be one. The symbolic expert is not neces sarily a particular living person but may be a complex of traditional evaluations and definitions which become personified… such as Rembrandt, Beethoven, Bach, Van Gogh… Copernicus and Galileo…" (pp. 277-228)
9 Bernard Rosenberg and Norris Fliegel, The Vanguard Artist—Portrait and Self-Portrait, Chicago Quadrangle Books, 1965: "by becoming celebrities too soon, many of the young are deprived of experience. The quiet novitiate, an extended period of steady work without public celebration, thoughens and inures a man to success. With adequate pre-conditioning and time to grow he can take it in stride. Young men in a hurry, overambitious to start with, who ‘click' on the marketplace find it difficult to resist the ballyhoo which envelops them." (pp. 57-58)
10 Rosenberg and Fliegel, op. cit.: "To get their work before a sizable audience, artists feel they are forced into alien procedures; they must also accept the fact that much of their work will be acquired by aesthetically unappreciative buyers. They are elated when things go otherwise, but there is rarely any expectation that they will. Few can hold out for the ‘perfect buyer.' The size of the purchasing audience often makes it difficult for the painter to known who his ‘customer' is." (pp. 194-195)
11 See Bensman and Lilienfeld, op. cit.
12 William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1896): "There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about… In minds able to speak at all there is, it is true, some knowledge about everything. Things can at least be classed, and the times of their appearance told. But in general, the less we analyze a thing, and the fewer of its relations we perceive, the less we know about it and the more our familiarity with it is of the acquaintance-type. The two kinds of knowledge are, therefore, as the human mind practically exerts them, relative terms. That is, te same thought of a thing may be called knowledge-about it in comparison with a simpler thought or acquaintance with it in comparison with a thought of it that is more articulate and explicit still." (pp. 221-222)
13 Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen, p. 212. This and many other features of the journalistic attitude were first developed in the polemic and satirical writings of Kraus, e. g. "A historian is often just a journalist facing backwards," ibid., p. 215. Kösel Verlag, 1955.
14 See Schutz, op. cit., pp. 122-3 and 132-3.
15 A by-product of this process is the development of a special journalistic language which conveys meaning by indirection, and by surrounding familiar words with new emotional connotations to convey meanings opposite to their traditional sense. In addition, new language, spelling, and coinages, elisions, acronyms, etc. are invented. These debase the traditional usages of language and introduce new forms of barbarism. They do, however, facilitate the above-described journalistic treatment of events. See, for example Dwight MacDonald, Against the American Grain, New York, Vintage Books, 1962, pp. 12-13, and the essays, "The Strong Untuned," pp. 289 ff and "The Decline and Fall of English," pp. 317 ff. See also Karl Kraus, Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie.
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