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 THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION
TO NEWS AND JOURNALISM

The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism brings together scholars committed to the
conceptual and methodological development of news and journalism studies from around
the world.
Across 50 chapters, organized thematically over seven sections, contributions examine a
range of pressing challenges for news reporting – including digital convergence, mobile plat-
forms, web analytics and datafication, social media polarization, and the use of drones. Jour-
nalism’s mediation of social issues is also explored, such as those pertaining to human rights,
civic engagement, gender inequalities, the environmental crisis, and the Black Lives Matter
movement. Each section raises important questions for academic research, generating fresh
insights into journalistic forms, practices, and epistemologies. The Companion furthers our
understanding of why we have ended up with the kind of news reporting we have ­today –
its remarkable strengths, the difficulties it faces, and how we might improve upon it for
tomorrow.
Completely revised and updated for its second edition, this volume is ideal for advanced
undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers, and academics in the fields of news, media, and
journalism studies.

Stuart Allan is Professor of Journalism and Communication in the School of Journalism,

Media and Culture, Cardiff University, UK.
 THE ROUTLEDGE
COMPANION TO NEWS
AND JOURNALISM
SECOND EDITION

Edited by Stuart Allan

 Cover image: © Getty Images
Second edition published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Stuart Allan individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Stuart Allan to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2011
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Allan, Stuart, 1962– editor.
Title: The Routledge companion to news and journalism /
edited by Stuart Allan.
Description: Second edition. | Abingdon, Oxon;
New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. |
Series: Routledge media and cultural studies companions |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022025305 | ISBN 9781032005850 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781032005867 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003174790 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Journalism. | Mass media.
Classification: LCC PN4731 .R68 2023 |
DDC 070.4071/1—dc23/eng/20220721
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025305

ISBN: 978-1-032-00585-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-00586-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-17479-0 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003174790

Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
 CONTENTS

List of figures x
List of tables xi
Notes on contributors xii

Introduction: The Value(s) of Truth-Seeking in News and Journalism 1

Stuart Allan

PART I
Journalism and Democracy 15

1 News and the Public Sphere 17

C.W. Anderson

2 India’s Imperiled Public Sphere: Challenges to Independent

Journalism in the World’s Largest Democracy 26
Kalyani Chadha

3 The Political Economy of Contemporary Journalism and the Crisis

of Public Knowledge 36
Peter Golding and Graham Murdock

4 Journalism and Community Engagement as if Democracy Matters 46

Lana F. Rakow

5 The So-Called “Crisis” of Trust in Journalism 55

Rachel E. Moran

v
 Contents

6 Journalists, Epistemology, and Authority 64

Matt Carlson

7 Social Roles of Journalism 73

Tim P. Vos

8 Bargaining with Local Journalism’s Value 82

Kristy Hess and Lisa Waller

PART II
Rewriting the Rules of Reporting 91

9 Journalism’s Multiple Gods: Objectivity, Its Variants, and Its Rivals 93

Michael Schudson

10 Newsroom Cultures at Risk? Journalism’s Reliance on Web Metrics

and Analytics 102
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon and Avery E. Holton

11 The Changing Status of Women Journalists 111

Linda Steiner and Dinfin Mulupi

12 Digital Journalism in China: Media Convergence, the ‘Central

Kitchen’ and the Platformization of News 121
Jing Meng and Shixin Ivy Zhang

13 Convergent Journalism: Cross-Media Content Strategies to Improve

the Quality of Thai News Reporting 130
Sakulsri Srisaracam

14 Pop Up Newsrooms: From New Collaborations to

Counter Narratives 139
Melissa Wall

15 Online Trolling of Journalists 149

Silvio Waisbord

PART III
News, Mobilities and Data 159

16 Witnessing George Floyd: Tracing Black Mobile Journalism’s Rise,

Impact and Enduring Questions 161
Allissa V. Richardson

vi
 Contents

17 Mobility, Smartphones and News 170

Andrew Duffy and Oscar Westlund

18 Journalism and Data Justice: Critically Reporting Datafication 179

Arne Hintz, Emiliano Treré and Naomi Owen

19 Balancing between “Statistical Panic” and “Statistical Boredom”:

News, Numbers and Narratives in the Risk Society 188
Brendan Lawson and An Nguyen

20 Hybrid Journalism 197

Stephen D. Reese

21 Podcast Journalism and Performative Transparency 207

Mia Lindgren

22 Drone Journalism: The Invisibility of the Aerial View 217

Jonas Harvard

PART IV
Crisis, Conflict and War Reporting 227

23 News Reporting of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Perspectives from the

Global South 229
Sara Chinnasamy and Felipe F. Salvosa II

24 Risk Journalism and Globalized Crisis Ecologies: Journalists as

‘Cosmopolitan’ Actors 239
Ingrid Volkmer

25 Video Journalism and Human Rights 248

Sandra Ristovska

26 Beyond Verification: UGC as Embodied Testimony in Conflict News 258

Lilie Chouliaraki and Omar Al-Ghazzi

27 The Ethics of War Reporting 267

Donald Matheson

28 News Reporting of Pakistan and the War on Terror 276

Shahzad Ali and Ahmer Safwan

29 Photojournalism and the US-Led Invasion of Afghanistan 286

Stuart Allan

vii
 Contents

PART V
Representing Realities 297

30 Journalism and Environmental Futures 299

Libby Lester

31 News Reporting of Poverty and Inequality 307

Jairo Lugo-Ocando

32 Journalism and Gender Violence 317

Lisa M. Cuklanz

33 Women in Sports News: Challenges Posed by the Emergence of

Popular Feminism 325
Erin Whiteside

34 Celebrity News Online: Changing Media, Actors, and Stories 334

Anne Jerslev and Mette Mortensen

35 Girls, News, and Public Cultures 343

Cynthia Carter and Kaitlynn Mendes

36 Socially Responsible Journalism: Diverse Responses to Polarisation 352

Laura Ahva

PART VI
Envisioning Alternative Journalisms 363

37 News Audiences and the Challenges of Digital Citizenship 365

Chris Peters

38 Contextualizing Citizen Visual Journalism: Narrative and Testimony 374

Mary Angela Bock

39 Citizen Journalism, Electoral Conflict and Peacebuilding Processes in

Kenya and Zimbabwe 384
Jacinta Maweu and Admire Mare

40 Journalism and Counterpublics: Is Journalism for All the People? 394

Bolette B. Blaagaard

41 News Literacy Practice in a Culture of Infodemic 403

Paul Mihailidis

viii
 Contents

42 Journalism and Ethnoracial Minorities 412

Sherry S. Yu and George L. Daniels

43 Teaching Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Journalism Students as

Change Agents? 421
Marcel Broersma and Jane B. Singer

PART VII
Globalising Journalisms 431

44 Comparing Journalistic Cultures across Nations 433

Folker Hanusch

45 Fringe Benefits: Weekly Magazines and Access Journalism in Japan 442

David McNeill and Kaori Hayashi

46 Arab Investigative Journalism: Exploring Processes of Cultural Change 451

Saba Bebawi

47 Theorizing Journalism and the Global South 460

Bruce Mutsvairo and Kristin Skare Orgeret

48 Mapping Anti-Press Violence in Latin America: Challenges for

Journalists’ Safety 469
Mireya Márquez-Ramírez

49 Devalued News Workers in the Labor of International Journalism:

Local Stringers and Fixers 478
Lindsay Palmer

50 Digital Journalistic Cultures on Social Media 487

Claudia Mellado

Index 497

ix
 FIGURES

I.1 Screenshot from Vremya newscast, Channel One, Russian Television,

March 14, 2022 1
28.1 Press freedom ranking of Pakistan in recent years among the list
of 180 countries 278
29.1 Screenshot of tweet by United States Department of Defense
August 31, 2021 287

x
 TABLES

3.1 Household expenditure on communications services (UK 2019/2020) 41

14.1 Three iterations of pop up newsrooms 141
28.1 Framing of terrorism-related sub-categories in British (The Guardian & The
Telegraph) and the American newspapers (New York Times & Washington Post)
for 1995–2015 regarding the overall image of Pakistan 281
36.1 Six journalism forms for social responsibility 358

xi
 CONTRIBUTORS

Laura Ahva is Associate Professor of Journalism Studies in the Faculty of Information

Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University, Finland. Her publications
include articles in the journals Journalism, Digital Journalism and Journalism Practice. Ahva’s re-
search interests are participatory and digital journalism, practice theory, news audiences, as
well as social responsibility in journalism.

Omar Al-Ghazzi is Associate Professor of Media and Communications at the London

School of Economics and Political Science, UK. His work focuses on questions around the
global power asymmetries in the reporting and representation of conflict. He researches
digital journalism, the politics of time and memory, and the geopolitics of popular culture,
with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. He is co-editor of the Middle East Journal
of Culture and Communication.

Shahzad Ali is Professor of Mass Communication as well as Director, Institute of Media

and Communication Studies, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, Pakistan. In 2012, he
was the recipient of Charles Wallace Fellowship at Bournemouth University, UK, and also
completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Cardiff University in 2016. He has published more
than 60 research articles in well-reputed journals of Pakistan and abroad.

Stuart Allan is Professor of Journalism and Communication in the School of Journal-

ism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University, UK. His current research includes an AHRC-
funded enquiry into public service broadcasting policymaking, as well as projects concerned
with visual journalism and citizenship, and histories of war photography.

C.W. Anderson is a Professor of Social and Political Science at the University of Milan,
Italy. His books include Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (Temple
University Press), Remaking the News (with Pablo Boczkowski, MIT Press), The Sage Hand-
book of Digital Journalism (with Tamara Witschge, David Domingo, and Alfred Hermida,
Sage), Journalism: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Len Downie and Michael Schudson,
Oxford University Press), Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt (Oxford
University Press), and The Journalism Manifesto (with Barbie Zelizer and Pablo Boczkowski).

xii
 Contributors

Saba Bebawi is Head of Discipline for Journalism and Writing at the University of Tech-
nology Sydney (UTS), Australia. She has published on media power and the role of media
in democracy-building, in addition to investigative journalism in conflict and post-conflict
regions. She is author of Media Power and Global Television News: The Role of Al Jazeera English
(2016), Investigative Journalism in the Arab World: Issues and Challenges (2016); and co-author
of The Future Foreign Correspondent (2019). She is co-editor of Social Media and the Politics of
Reportage: The 'Arab Spring' (2014) and Data Journalism in the Global South (2020).

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon (PhD, City, University of London) is Associate Professor and

Cowles Fellow in Media Management at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Com-
munication, University of Minnesota, USA. She is the author of The Paradox of Connec-
tion: How Digital Media is Transforming Journalistic Labor (University of Illinois Press,
2023, with Diana Bossio, Avery Holton and Logan Molyneux), Social Media at BBC News
(Routledge, 2015). She is co-editor of Happiness in Journalism (Routledge, forthcom-
ing, with Avery Holton, Mark Deuze and Claudia Mellado) and Journalism Research that
­Matters (Oxford University Press, 2021, with Nikki Usher).

Bolette B. Blaagaard is Associate Professor of Communication at Aalborg University,

Copenhagen, Denmark. She is author of Citizen Journalism as Conceptual Practice: Postcolonial
Archives and Embodied Political Acts of New Media (Rowman & Littlefield) as well as editor
of several volumes on citizen media. She is co-editor of the Routledge book series Critical
Perspectives on Citizen Media.

Mary Angela Bock is Associate Professor in the Austin School of Journalism and Media
at the University of Texas, USA. She is a former TV journalist turned academic with an
interest in the sociology and critique of photographic practice. She received her PhD from
the University of Pennsylvania. Her latest book, Seeing Justice: Witnessing, Crime and Punish-
ment in Visual Media (Oxford University Press, 2021), explores the way justice is visualized
in contemporary media.

Marcel Broersma is Professor of Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Gron-
ingen, The Netherlands. His research focuses on the interface between the digital transfor-
mation of journalism, social media, changing media use, and digital literacy and inclusion.

Matt Carlson is Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication,
University of Minnesota, USA. His most recent books are News After Trump: Journalism’s
Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture (co-authored with Sue Robinson and Seth C.
Lewis) and Journalistic Authority: Legitimating News in the Digital Era.

Cynthia Carter is Reader in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff Uni-
versity, UK. She has published widely on children, news, and citizenship; young people and
public service broadcasting; and feminist news and journalism studies. Her most recent book
is the co-edited Journalism, Gender and Power (Routledge, 2019). She is a founding Co-Editor
of Feminist Media Studies and serves on the editorial board of numerous media and commu-
nication studies journals.

Kalyani Chadha is Associate Professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of

Journalism, USA. Her research focuses on the media and journalism landscape in India,

xiii
 Contributors

media globalization, as well as the implications of new media technologies. She co-edited
the collection Newswork and Precarity and her work has appeared in journals such as Journalism
Studies, Journalism Practice, and the International Journal of Communication. She serves on the
editorial boards of Journalism Practice and Digital Journalism.

Sara Chinnasamy (PhD) is Associate Professor at the Universiti Teknologi MARA, Ma-
laysia. She is also a political and social media analyst published on a weekly basis in major
newspapers and broadcast media. She completed her PhD in new media politics at the Uni-
versity of Adelaide, and conducted postdoctoral research in digital politics at the University
of Melbourne, Australia. She is author of New Media Political Engagement and Participation in
Malaysia (Routledge, 2018).

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of

Economics and Political Science, UK. She has published extensively on distant suffering as
a problem of communication and is author or co-author, among others, of Discourse in Late
Modernity (2000), The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006/2011), The Ironic Spectator (2013), and
The Digital Border (2022).

Lisa M. Cuklanz is Professor in the Communication Department at Boston College, USA.

She served as department chair from 2007 to 2019, and previously as Director of the Wom-
en’s and Gender Studies Program at Boston College. Her research focuses on representations
of violence in media. She is author or editor of five books and dozens of other publications.
Her work has appeared in journals including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Commu-
nication Quarterly, Women’s Studies in Communication, and Communication Studies.

George L. Daniels is Associate Professor of Journalism and Creative Media in the College
of Communication and Information Sciences at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa,
USA. Most recently, he served as the College’s assistant dean for administration. Since 2003,
he’s taught courses in cross-platform reporting, electronic news reporting, media manage-
ment, and diversity. A former television news producer, Daniels is co-editor of Teaching Race:
Struggles, Strategies and Scholarship for the Mass Communication Classroom.

Andrew Duffy is Assistant Professor of Journalism Studies at Nanyang Technological Uni-

versity, Singapore. Formerly a journalist and an editor on magazines and newspapers, his
interests cover the intersection of media and mobility as it relates to travel, and the meeting
point of mobility and media as it relates to journalism.

Peter Golding is Professor Emeritus at Northumbria University, and Visiting Professor at

Newcastle University. Until July 2015 he was Pro Vice-Chancellor at Northumbria Uni-
versity, and previously Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Loughborough University, where
he was Head of Social Sciences from 1991–2006. He is a co-editor of the European Journal of
Communication, and Honorary Chair of the European Sociological Association Media Re-
search Network. His research is on media sociology, journalism, and media political econ-
omy, and he is currently completing a book on communications and inequality.

Folker Hanusch is Professor of Journalism at the University of Vienna, Austria, and Editor-
in-Chief of the journal Journalism Studies. His research interests lie in comparative journal-
ism studies, journalism and everyday life, digital transformations and blurring boundaries of

xiv
 Contributors

journalism, and Indigenous journalism. He is also Vice-Chair of the Worlds of Journalism

Study.

Jonas Harvard is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication Sci-
ence, Mid Sweden University, Sweden, and Adjunct Professor in the History of Political
Discourse and Communication at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His research con-
cerns the roles of technology in journalism, media history in the Nordic countries, and the
transformation of local news media business in Sweden.

Kaori Hayashi is Professor of Media and Journalism Studies at the Graduate School of
Interdisciplinary Information Studies, the University of Tokyo, Japan. She is Executive
Vice President of the University of Tokyo in charge of global and diversity affairs, as well
as Director of the B’AI Global Forum, which was set up within the Institute for AI and
Beyond at the University of Tokyo. Her most recent English-language publications report
on research into digital journalism in Japan, including women’s media choices within a
global context.

Kristy Hess is Professor of Communication at Deakin University, Australia. Her research

focuses on local media, digital journalism, and its relationship to social order and media pol-
icy. Kristy has published widely in leading scholarly journals, has co-authored two books,
co-edited three international collections, is associate editor of Digital Journalism, and is a chief
investigator on two current Australian Research Council projects.

Arne Hintz is Reader at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture,
UK, and co-Director of its Data Justice Lab. His research explores questions of participation,
democratization, governance and citizenship in the context of technological change. Recent
publications include the co-authored Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society (Polity, 2019) and
Data Justice (Sage, 2022).

Avery E. Holton (PhD, University of Texas Austin) is Associate Professor and Chair of
the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, USA. He is Co-Coordinator
of Research for the University of Utah Center for Ethical, Legal and Social Implications
(UCEER), funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is co-author of The
Paradox of Connection: How Digital Media is Transforming Journalistic Labor (University
of Illinois Press, 2023, with Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, Diana Bossio and Logan Molyneux)
and co-editor of Happiness in Journalism (Routledge, forthcoming, with Valérie Bélair-­
Gagnon, Mark Deuze and Claudia Mellado).

Anne Jerslev is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the Department of Communication,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has published extensively within celebrity studies
such as on celebrity selfies and paparazzi photography with Mette Mortensen, and more re-
cently on ageing women in the media and the TV series ‘Grace and Frankie’. She is author
of monographs on cult films, young people watching videos together, media and intimacy,
and reality TV. Her most recent monograph is David Lynch: Blurred Boundaries (Palgrave
MacMillan, 2021).

Brendan Lawson is University Teacher at Loughborough University, UK, who writes

about the way numbers become meaningful across politics, journalism, and expertise. His

xv
 Contributors

latest book is The Life of a Number: Measurement, Meaning and Covid-19 (Bristol University
Press, 2023).

Libby Lester is Director of the Institute for Social Change at the University of Tasmania,
Australia, and UNESCO Chair in Communication, Environment, and Heritage. She works
to understand the place of public debate in local and global decision-making, and her re-
search on environmental communication and political conflict is widely published. Before
joining the University, she worked as a journalist for 15 years, reporting for The Age and
other Australian newspapers and magazines.

Mia Lindgren is Professor of Media and Director, Research Strategy at the University
of Tasmania, Australia, and also an Adjunct at Swinburne University of Technology,
Melbourne. Her research examines storytelling practices, mostly in non-fiction audio
forms. She has published widely in the areas of podcasting, radio, journalism, and health
communication. She is co-editor, with Jason Loviglio, of the Routledge Companion to Ra-
dio and Podcast Studies (2022) and Radio Journal: International Studies of Broadcast and Audio
Media (Intellect).

Jairo Lugo-Ocando (PhD) is currently Professor of Journalism Studies and Dean of the
College of Communication at the University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Before
joining Sharjah, he worked at Northwestern University, the University of Leeds, the Uni-
versity of Sheffield, and the University of Stirling. He is author of several monographs and
journal articles relating to how the news media cover poverty.

Admire Mare is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media,

Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg, Kingsway Campus, South Africa. His
research interests include social media, digital journalism, democracy, digital campaigns,
fake news and cyber-propaganda, media, conflict, and peacebuilding studies. He holds a
PhD and Master of Arts in Journalism and Media Studies from Rhodes University, Graha-
mstown, South Africa.

Mireya Márquez-Ramírez is Associate Professor of Journalism Studies and Media Theory

at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico. She received a MA degree from
Cardiff University in 2005 and PhD degree from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2012.
She has published extensively on topics such as comparative journalism cultures, journalists’
safety and anti-press violence, and beat journalism (especially health and sports). She is Prin-
cipal Investigator and team leader for the Journalistic Role Performance and Worlds of Jour-
nalism Study cross-national projects in Mexico and Bolivia, respectively. She also participates
in various journalists’ training and freedom of the press advocacy initiatives in her country.

Donald Matheson is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Can-

terbury, New Zealand. He writes on journalism in conflict, journalism in social media, and
other digital contexts and communication ethics. He is co-editor of the journal Ethical Space:
The International Journal of Communication Ethics and has written two books, Media Discourses
(Open University Press, 2004) and (co-authored with Stuart Allan) Digital War Reporting
(Polity, 2009).

xvi
 Contributors

Jacinta Maweu is Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Media Studies at the University of
Nairobi, Kenya, where she researches and teaches in the areas of social and political phi-
losophy, as well as media, conflict, and human rights. She holds two MA degrees in both
Philosophy and Media Studies, and a PhD in Media Ethics and the Political Economy of the
Media.

David McNeill is Professor of Communications and English at Sacred Heart University,

Tokyo, Japan. He was previously a correspondent for The Independent, The Economist, and The
Chronicle of Higher Education, and is co-author of the book Strong in the Rain, about the 2011
Tohoku disaster. He is a columnist for The Mainichi Shimbun and is currently writing a Jap-
anese book called Confessions of a Foreign Correspondent. He lives in Tokyo with his Japanese
wife and three children.

Claudia Mellado is Professor of Journalism in the School of Journalism at the Pontificia

Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. Her research focuses on the study of jour-
nalism cultures, journalistic role performance, and comparative studies. She is Principal
Investigator of the JRP Project (www.journalisticperformance.org). Her most recent ed-
ited book is Beyond Journalistic Norms Role Performance and News in Comparative Perspective
(Routledge, 2021).

Kaitlynn Mendes is Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in In-
equality and Gender at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She is an expert in
research around representations of feminism in the news, and the mediation of rape culture.
More recently, using mixed methods, she explores how digital technologies pave the way
for new forms of online abuse, while simultaneously being used to challenge sexism, sexual
violence, rape culture, and harassment in on and offline spaces.

Jing Meng (PhD) is Assistant Professor of Media Studies with Peking University HSBC
Business School, China. Her research interests are digital journalism, visual culture, and
new digital technology. She has published in journals including Chinese Journal of Communi-
cation, Asian Journal of Communication, Media, Culture and Society, Journal of Chinese Cinemas,
and a monograph entitled Fragmented Memories and Nostalgic Screening of the Cultural Revolution
(2020) with Hong Kong University Press.

Paul Mihailidis is Professor of Civic Media and Journalism and Assistant Dean in the
School of Communication at Emerson College in Boston, MA, USA, where he teaches me-
dia literacy, civic media, and community activism. He is founding program director of the
MA in Media Design, Senior Fellow of the Emerson Engagement Lab, and faculty chair and
director of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change.

Rachel E. Moran is Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for an Informed Public based within
the Information School at the University of Washington, USA. Her research explores the
role of trust in digital information environments and is particularly concerned with how
trust is implicated in the spread of mis- and dis-information. Moran’s work has been pub-
lished in Information, Communication & Society, Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice, Media,
Culture & Society, and Telecommunications Policy.

xvii
 Contributors

Mette Mortensen is Professor and Deputy Head of Department for Research at the De-
partment of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is Principal Inves-
tigator of the research project ‘Images of Conflict, Conflicting Images’ (Velux Foundation,
2017–2022). She is author or editor of nine books, including the monograph Eyewitness
Images and Journalism: Digital Media, Participation, and Conflict (Routledge 2015) and, most
recently, the volume Social Media Images and Conflicts (co-edited with Ally McCrow-Young
for Routledge, 2022).

Dinfin Mulupi is PhD student in Journalism Studies at the University of Maryland, Col-
lege Park, USA. She holds an Erasmus Mundus MA in Journalism, Media, and Globalisation
from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark) and City, University of London in the UK. Dinfin’s
research interests focus on the intersection between media, race, and gender equity, partic-
ularly the representation of women and ethnic minorities in newsrooms and news content,
and uses of social networking platforms for feminist and racial justice activism.

Graham Murdock is Emeritus Professor of Culture and Economy at the Department of

Social Sciences, Loughborough University, UK. He served for four years as Vice President of
the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). His recent
books include the co-edited Money Talks: Media, Markets, Crisis (Intellect, 2015) and Carbon
Capitalism and Communication: Confronting Climate Crisis (Palgrave 2017). A third edition of
the influential text Researching Communications, written jointly with colleagues, was published
by Bloomsbury in 2021.

Bruce Mutsvairo is Full Professor and Chair in Media, Politics and the Global South at the
Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His work focuses on the role
of political, social, and journalistic influences of digital media in non-Western societies. He
is author or editor of ten academic books, including (with Daniel Kreiss and Ulrike Klinger)
Platforms, Power and Politics: Global Political Communication for the 21st Century (Polity, 2022).

An Nguyen is Professor of Journalism and Co-director of the Centre for Science, Health
and Data Communication Research at Bournemouth University, UK. His research expertise
includes science journalism in the post-truth era, news communication of data and statistics,
and public engagement with science controversies.

Kristin Skare Orgeret (Dr Art) is Full Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media
Studies at OsloMet University, Norway, where she co-heads the research group MEKK (Media,
War, Conflict). Orgeret has broad experience from research and lecturing in several African and
Asian countries. She has published extensively in international academic journals and edited sev-
eral anthologies within the fields of media and conflict, digital journalism, and gender. She cur-
rently heads the NRC-funded project ‘Decoding Digital Media in African Regions of Conflict’
(DD-MAC) with partners from Ethiopia, Mali, the Netherlands, and Norway.

Naomi Owen is ESRC-funded PhD student at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism,

Media and Culture, UK. Her thesis explores the changing nature of data journalism in the
context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on theories of accountability, collaboration,
and networking, her research considers data journalism from a more sociological perspec-
tive, emphasizing journalism’s blurred boundaries in the digital age.

xviii
 Contributors

Lindsay Palmer is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communi-
cation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. She is author of Becoming the Story:
War Correspondents Since 9/11, and The Fixers: Local News Workers and the Underground Labor
of International Reporting.

Chris Peters is Professor and Co-Founder/Director of the Centre for Digital Citizenship
at Roskilde University, Denmark, as well as Principal Investigator of ‘Beyond the Here and
Now of News’, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. Peters is a media so-
ciologist and publishes in the areas of media, journalism, and audience studies. He is editor of
six books and special issues, including Rethinking Journalism (Routledge, 2012) and Rethinking
Journalism Again (Routledge, 2016).

Lana F. Rakow is Professor Emerita of Communication at the University of North Da-

kota, USA, and is author or editor of numerous publications on feminist and media theory.
Her most recent book is John Dewey (Peter Lang, 2019). Rakow was founder and director
of the UND Center for Community Engagement, which initiated several civic media proj-
ects. She currently serves on the City of West Fargo (North Dakota) Planning and Zoning
Commission.

Stephen D. Reese is Jesse H. Jones Professor of Journalism and Media at the University
of Texas at Austin, USA, where he has been on the faculty since 1982. His research focuses
on press performance, including the sociology of news, media framing of public issues, and
the globalization of journalism. His most recent book is The Crisis of the Institutional Press
(Polity, 2021).

Allissa V. Richardson (PhD) is Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of

Southern California’s Annenberg School in the USA. She is author of Bearing Witness While
Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism (Oxford University
Press, 2020). Additionally, Richardson has held faculty fellowships with Harvard Universi-
ty’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and
Society, and at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

Sandra Ristovska is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the College of Media, Com-
munication, and Information, University of Colorado Boulder, USA. A 2021 Mellon/ACLS
Scholars and Society Fellow, Ristovska is author of Seeing Human Rights: Video Activism as a
Proxy Profession (MIT Press, 2021) and co-editor of Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice
(Palgrave, 2018).

Ahmer Safwan is presently working as visiting lecturer at Bahauddin Zakariya University,

Multan, Pakistan. He has published several articles in reputed journals of Pakistan.

Felipe F. Salvosa II heads the Journalism Program at the University of Santo Tomas
(UST), Manila, Philippines. He is also Researcher under the UST Research Center for
Culture, Arts and the Humanities. Salvosa is formerly head of research and associate ed-
itor of BusinessWorld, managing editor of the Manila Times, a researcher for the Financial
Times Group of London, and publications chief of the Philippine Institute for Development

xix
 Contributors

Studies. He is Director of the Philippines Communication Society and Vice President of the
Journalism Studies Association of the Philippines.

Michael Schudson is Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, USA. He is au-

thor of books on the historical evolution of public values (objectivity in journalism, the
‘informed citizen’ in political culture, and ‘transparency’ in public policy). He received
his BA from Swarthmore College and PhD in Sociology from Harvard University. He
has been awarded the MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ fellowship and honorary degrees
from the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) and Hong Kong Baptist University.

Jane B. Singer is Professor of Journalism Innovation at City, University of London, UK.

She previously held academic staff posts at the University of Iowa and Colorado State Uni-
versity (US) and served as Johnston Press Chair in Digital Journalism at the University of
Central Lancashire (UK). A former print and online journalist, her research has traced the
evolution of digital journalism since the mid-1990s, with a focus on journalists’ changing
roles, perceptions, norms, and practices.

Sakulsri Srisaracam is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Communication Arts, Chu-

lalongkorn University, Thailand. Her teaching and research focus on digital and convergent
journalism, transmedia storytelling, and media innovation. She is particularly interested in
using design thinking processes to develop content strategies. She has organized the ‘Thai
Media Lab’, a network of academics conducting participatory action research to improve the
reporting of social issues.

Linda Steiner is Professor of Journalism and Director of ADVANCE, in the Office of

Faculty Affairs, at the University of Maryland, USA. She edits the journal Journalism &
Communication Monographs, and has published nine co-authored or co-edited books, most
recently, Newswork and Precarity and Front Pages, Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women's
Suffrage. Steiner is Fellow of the International Communication Association. Her research
interests include media ethics, feminist theorizing, and conceptions/roles of women in the
media workforce.

Emiliano Treré is Reader in Data Agency and Media Ecologies at Cardiff University’s
School of Journalism, Media and Culture, UK. He is a widely cited author in digital activism
and critical data studies with a focus on the Global South. He co-founded the ‘Big Data from
the South’ Initiative and co-directs the Data Justice Lab. His book Hybrid Media Activism
(Routledge, 2019) won the Outstanding Book Award of the ICA Interest Group ‘Activism,
Communication and Social Justice’.

Ingrid Volkmer is Professor of Digital Communication and Globalisation at the University

of Melbourne, Australia. Among her recent books is Risk Journalism: Between Transnational
Politics and Climate Change, co-authored with K. Sharif (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Volkmer
is Director of the Global Risk Journalism Hub, a large international research network address-
ing new empirical and conceptual approaches to journalism in times of global crises. She has
held several visiting positions, including at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and
the Free University Berlin.

xx
 Contributors

Tim P. Vos is Professor and Director of the School of Journalism at Michigan State Uni-
versity, USA. His research examines the roles of journalism, media sociology and gatekeep-
ing, and media history. He has published over 60 journal articles and book chapters. He is
also co-author, co-editor, or editor of four books and the International Communication
Association’s (ICA) International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies. He is book series editor of
Journalism in Perspective from the University of Missouri Press.

Silvio Waisbord is Director and Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at
George Washington University, USA. He is author or editor of 18 books, including The
Communication Manifesto (Polity), and El Imperio de la Utopia (Peninsula). He is former
­Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Communication and the International Journal of Press/Politics.
He is Fellow of the International Communication Association. Waisbord received a Licenci-
atura in Sociology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and a PhD in Sociology from the
University of California, San Diego.

Melissa Wall is Professor of Journalism at California State University Northridge, USA.

She is founder of the Pop Up Newsroom, a temporary virtual newsroom, to which students
in Brazil, Britain, Germany, India, Lebanon, and other countries have contributed. She
co-created the Institute for Conspiracy Theory Analysis, a social art project, as part of a
residency at Kulturni Centar REX/Fond B92 in Belgrade, Serbia.

Lisa Waller is Professor and Associate Dean of Communication in the School of Media
and Communication, RMIT University, Australia. She has taught and researched different
aspects of Australian news media and journalism since 2006. Her practice-led approach to
understanding news is grounded in 20 years’ experience as a journalist at some of Australia’s
leading newspapers.

Oscar Westlund (PhD) is Professor at Oslo Metropolitan University, where he co-leads the
OsloMet Digital Journalism Research Group. He holds a secondary appointment at the Uni-
versity of Gothenburg and is honorary Professor in the Faculty of Journalism at Lomonosov
Moscow State University. Westlund is Editor-in-Chief of Digital Journalism. He researches
the intersections of journalism, technology, and business.

Erin Whiteside is Associate Professor of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University
of Tennessee, USA. Her research focuses on sports media, including the processes by which
girls’ and women’s sports are covered, the experiences of women working in sports, and
the evolving boundaries of sports journalism work routines. Dr Whiteside has published in
journals such as Journalism, Mass Communication & Society, Communication & Sport, and Media,
Culture & Society.

Sherry S. Yu is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media, and
the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research explores
multiculturalism, media, and social integration. She is author of Diasporic Media Beyond the
Diaspora: Korean Media in Vancouver and Los Angeles (2018, UBC Press) and co-editor of Ethnic
Media in the Digital Age (2019, Routledge). Her research has also been published in scholarly
journals such as Journalism, Journalism Studies, and Television & New Media.

xxi
 Contributors

Shixin Ivy Zhang (PhD, University of Leeds, UK) is Associate Professor of Journalism
Studies at the School of International Communications, University of Nottingham Ningbo,
China. She is specialized in journalism studies, media and conflict, media globalization, and
media management. She is author of three monographs: Impact of Globalization on the Local
Press in China (2014), Chinese War Correspondents: Covering Wars and Conflicts in the 21st Cen-
tury (2016), and Media and Conflict in the Social Media Era in China (2020).

xxii
 INTRODUCTION
The Value(s) of Truth-Seeking in News and
Journalism

Stuart Allan

‘Stop the war. No to war,’ Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor at Channel One, shouted as she
interrupted a live broadcast of the Russian channel’s main nightly news programme, ‘Vre-
mya,’ on March 14, 2022. A placard she held up to millions of viewers added: ‘Don’t believe
the propaganda. They’re lying to you here,’ and was signed, in English, ‘Russians against the
war.’ Ovsyannikova’s protest lasted several seconds before the Kremlin-controlled channel
cutaway to a previously taped segment, but it was long enough to reverberate around the
world (Figure I.1).
Dissent is disruptive, provoking discussion and debate where they may be otherwise sup-
pressed, perhaps most insidiously by self-censorship. For publicly denouncing the unpro-
voked Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ovsyannikova was arrested and detained in a Moscow
police station, where she endured 14 hours of questioning without a lawyer before being
fined and released (possible further charges pending). Legislation introduced ten days earlier
criminalised the spreading of so-called ‘false’ or ‘fake news’ about the ‘special military oper-
ation’ – the words ‘war,’ ‘invasion’ and ‘occupation’ being prohibited – waged by the Russian

Figure I.1 Screenshot from Vremya newscast, Channel One, Russian Television, March 14, 2022

DOI: 10.4324/9781003174790-11
 Stuart Allan

armed forces to ‘demilitarise and denazify’ seized Ukrainian territory. In a pre-recorded

video released via OVD-Info, a human rights media group, Ovsyannikova explained her
reasoning with remarkable candour:

Unfortunately, for the last several years, I worked at Channel One, promoting Kremlin
propaganda and for that I am very ashamed right now. I am ashamed that I allowed lies
to be told from TV screens, that I allowed Russian people to be zombified. We stayed
quiet when all of this was just getting started in 2014 [with Russia’s annexation of
Crimea]. We didn`t come out to protest when the Kremlin poisoned [anti-corruption
campaigner Alexei] Navalny. We continued to quietly watch this inhuman regime.
Now the whole world turned away from us. Ten generations of our descendants won’t
be able to wash away the shame of this fratricidal war.
(Ovsyannikova, 2022)

She called on her fellow Russians to join the opposition against the war, pointing out they
have the power to ‘stop all this madness,’ and should not be afraid. ‘They can’t imprison us
all,’ she added. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expressed his appreciation for her
actions in a Telegram video. ‘I am grateful to those Russians who do not stop trying to con-
vey the truth,’ he affirmed. ‘To those who fight disinformation and tell the truth, real facts to
their friends and loved ones’ (cited in Beech, 2022). Speaking to the BBC’s Caroline Davies
(2022) after her release, Ovsyannikova likened herself to ‘an ordinary cog in the propaganda
machine’ prior to making a sudden decision to intervene. She came to the realisation it was
‘impossible to stay silent,’ she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (2022), with ‘50 percent
of our society’ effectively ‘brainwashed’ to believe ‘the phrases our propagandists created.’
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, responding to questions from Reuters, insisted
that ‘as far as this woman is concerned, this is hooliganism,’ before describing Channel One
‘as a pillar of objective and timely news’ (Trevelyan and Humphries, 2022). International
news programmes were already terminating their coverage from Moscow bureaus because
of the new ‘fake news’ censorship legislation, while growing numbers of Russian journalists
resigned their posts. Labelled ‘foreign agents’ and ‘national traitors’ by the authorities, hun-
dreds of them prepared to leave the country. As the government crackdown on independent
news organisations and foreign social media networks gathered momentum, outlets such as
the popular television station Dozhd (‘TV Rain’) and investigative newspaper and website
Novaya Gazeta suspended their operations. The latter’s editor, Dmitry Muratov, a co-winner
with Philippine journalist Maria Ressa of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, felt there was no
choice. ‘We will not become propagandists,’ he had pledged in an earlier interview with
The New Yorker. ‘We respect the sovereignty of Ukraine – and the sovereignty of Novaya
Gazeta’ (cited in Remnick, 2022). In his Nobel Prize lecture the previous December, Mura-
tov (2021) honoured those risking their lives for press freedom. ‘Yes, we growl and bite. Yes,
we have sharp teeth and strong grip,’ he avowed. ‘But we are the prerequisite for progress.
We are the antidote against tyranny.’ Announcing the planned sale of his Nobel medal at
auction, he promised to donate the proceeds to Ukrainian refugees.
Reportage of an altogether different order emerged across social media platforms from
the onset of this major escalation of the war, where a variety of sites and apps – including
TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, amongst others – were pressed into service
by individuals intent on raising awareness by sharing alternative insights and perspectives.
‘When Russia invaded Ukraine last week, some of social media’s youngest users experi-
enced the conflict from the front lines on TikTok,’ Sheila Dang and Elizabeth Culliford

2
 Introduction

(2022) reported. ‘Videos of people huddling and crying in windowless bomb shelters, ex-
plosions blasting through urban settings and missiles streaking across Ukrainian cities took
over the app from its usual offerings of fashion, fitness and dance videos.’ As the salience of
­user-generated content on the remix app surged, particularly amongst its ‘Gen Z’ users (born
between 1997 and 2012), numerous media commentaries began referring to the conflict as
the world’s first fully-fledged ‘TikTok war’. Impromptu video clips and still images, many
livestreamed by citizen witnesses in the wrong place at the right time, put the lie to Russian
assertions. Kremlin claims that its forces were ‘liberators’ and ‘heroes’ welcomed by the
Ukrainian people swiftly unravelled, for example, together with reassurances civilians liv-
ing in residential areas were not being deliberately targeted. ‘The bombings and violence in
cities like Mariupol, Kharkiv and Kyiv feature a cast of newly minted stars,’ Kate Linthicum
(2022) of the Los Angeles Times wrote, ‘social media standouts who rely on satire, grit and an
insider’s sensibilities to document the horrors for a global audience.’
TikTok’s capacity to give shape and direction to certain narratives at stake had been
recognised from the outset. Ukrainian leader Zelenskyy appealed to ‘TikTokers’ in Russia
to help end the war, while shortly afterwards White House and National Security Council
staffers held a briefing with 30 TikTok Influencers. ‘I’m here to relay the information in
a more digestible manner to my followers,’ Ellie Zeiler, an 18-year-old TikTok star with
almost 11 million followers at the time, told the Washington Post. ‘I would consider myself
a White House correspondent for Gen Z’ (cited in Lorenz, 2022). Amongst the more cel-
ebratory press accounts, however, concerns were raised. ‘Each one of these TikTok videos
is a tiny little snapshot of a tiny little moment of time, often without any other overlaying
context,’ David French of The Dispatch told CNN. ‘And so you really would have to spend
an enormous time with some real background to begin to piece together the TikTok jigsaw
puzzle’ (cited in Maruf, 2022). Mistakes and misinformation took many forms under fluidly
evolving circumstances, the affectivities of immediacy sometimes overriding responsibilities
to verify and corroborate authenticity before relaying across real-time networks. Rumours,
parodies, hoaxes, and conspiracies were rampant. More sinister were disinformation tac-
tics, exploiting TikTok’s minimalist content labelling and moderation measures to spread
false narratives – ranging from influencers paid to post half-truths or outright lies, footage
purportedly recorded in Ukraine when actually captured elsewhere, photoshopped images,
weaponised memes, deepfake videos, and the like – sowing discord, confusion and cynicism.
Many of the challenges confronting journalists endeavouring to sift credible fact from
tendentious fictions in the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine echo those in earlier con-
flicts. During the initial phases of the US-led invasion of Iraq, for example, many Western
correspondents found themselves acting as – to paraphrase Ovsyannikova’s words above -
‘ordinary cogs in the propaganda machine,’ including by misreporting as true the Bush
administrations’ false claims about Iraqi WMDs or ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (A small
number of news organisations, such as The New York Times (2004), would eventually apol-
ogise for their misleading coverage, but most resisted public self-reflection). ‘The constant
drumbeat of “WMD, WMD, WMD” in the media and among politicians in the lead-up
to the invasion,’ Lewandowsky and van der Linden (2021) argue, ‘followed by innumerable
media reports of “preliminary tests” that tested positive for chemical weapons during the
early stages of the conflict,’ though never confirmed, ‘created a strong impression that those
weapons had been discovered’ (2021: 350). This persistent false impression proved so power-
ful, they add, ‘notable segments of the American public continued to believe, up until at least
2014, that either the U.S. had found WMDs in Iraq or that Iraq had hidden the weapons so
well that they escaped detection’ (2021: 350). Twenty years on, lessons still need to be learned

3
 Stuart Allan

about journalistic complicity, inadvertent or otherwise, in the manufacture of a WMD threat

that did not exist. Upholding public trust demands nothing less. In addition to combatants who
died in the war, and those who perished due to loss of access to food and water, or war-related
disease, the Watson Institute (2022) estimates between 184,382 and 207,156 Iraqi civilians
were killed by direct violence between March 2003 and October 2019.
‘The horrific scenes unfolding in Ukraine have also played out in Iraq,’ journalist Shawn
Yuan (2022) in Baghdad for Al Jazeera.com observed. ‘To witness attacks in another part
of the world for Iraqis is a painful reminder for many here who have lost their hopes and
dreams of an end to war.’ One can safely assume similar views are being expressed in other
countries where the terrors of war, civil conflict and insurgencies are cruel realities, such as
in Syria, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Gaza and Myanmar, amongst so many others. At the
same time, the value of truth-seeking in journalism resonates in a myriad of ongoing crises
beyond warfare’s atrocities:

• News reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to vary markedly from one na-
tional context to the next around the globe, yet the difficulties associated with defining
truth in an ‘indodemic’ – as described by the World Health Organization (2020) near
the outset – continues to be a common concern. An infodemic, by its definition, is ‘an
over-abundance of information – some accurate and some not – that makes it hard for
people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it’ (WHO,
2020). WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (2020) underscored sev-
eral implications for journalism, which have become all too real in the years since. ‘Fake
news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous,’ he pointed
out. News organisations, he warned, need ‘to sound the appropriate level of alarm,
without fanning the flames of hysteria,’ otherwise ‘we are headed down a dark path
that leads nowhere but division and disharmony.’ When science becomes politicised
in a climate of fear, including by those stoking scepticism about vaccines by fabricat-
ing or falsifying statistical health data, preparation for the next outbreak requires new
trust-building strategies be forged for improving risk-centric reporting.
• Politicians intent on exacerbating social divisions in pursuit of power, polarising ques-
tions of truth in extremist terms, typically denounce the news media for inventing lies
about them. In addition to the Russian deceptions described above, authoritarian leaders
in several countries have taken their cue from former US President Donald Trump to
co-opt the phrase ‘fake news’ to rhetorically counter perceived slights or criticisms, and
thereby discredit individual reporters and certain news outlets as illegitimate. Trump’s
use of the derisive label on the campaign trail soon escalated into a wider indictment of
the press as the ‘enemy of the people’ during his presidency. Even Murdoch-controlled
Fox News, ordinarily obsequious in propagating ‘alternative facts’ and conspiracy the-
ories in its reporting and commentaries, has not been immune to Trump’s duplicitous
tactics. As evidence of the former president’s culpability in inciting violence in a failed
coup attempt in January 2021 mounts, the damage to democratic structures wrought by
the far right’s concerted efforts to undermine public confidence in independent journal-
ism continues. Post-pandemic, action plans for ‘building back better’ need to encom-
pass news and social media ecologies to enhance diversity, inclusion, transparency and
accountability in the public interest. Debates over further legal and regulatory frame-
works for media and Big Tech companies behaving irresponsibly require reinvigoration,
particularly where these organisations are incentivised to monetise antagonism, intoler-
ance, and conspiracy for profit.

4
 Introduction

• Environmental journalists striving to report on the climate emergency are acutely aware
how entrenched stakeholders, not least those aligned with the fossil fuel industry, invest
significant resources in mobilising certain preferred formulations of truth to influence
related news coverage. In addition to underplaying pollution’s impact, a key strategic
objective is to foster uncertainty about what is a very strong scientific consensus about
corresponding harms to the environment and human health. In response, news organi-
sations are recognising stronger language is required to mediate disputes over risk, evi-
dence, and expertise more effectively. ‘We want to ensure that we are being scientifically
precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue,’
The Guardian’s editor Katharine Viner stated when announcing an updated style guide.
‘The phrase “climate change,” for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what
scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity’ (cited in Carrington, 2019).
Overcoming the problem of false balance, where opposing viewpoints between climate
scientists and climate deniers are given similar weight, is a further pressing priority in
rethinking the protocols, values and conventions of environmental news. Rigorous,
evidence-led scrutiny of decision-makers makes accountability possible, helping to dis-
rupt the ideological purchase of what are highly sophisticated disinformation campaigns
seeking to gamify the attention economy to advantage.
• Normative ideals of free and open expression, where Truth will emerge from the clash
of competing truths fostered by neutral, objective news reporting, have long been sub-
jected to critique by journalists and their critics alike. For many efforts to re-envision
the news media’s responsibilities to sustain and enrich public spheres today, the right to
free speech – including speaking truth to power – demands a radical recasting of jour-
nalistic tendencies to inferentially privilege white, male, heteronormative, professional
points of view as ‘common sense.’ Such efforts invite dialogue about ethical standards
and moral principles, recognising how the exclusion, marginalisation or trivialisation of
alternative opinions and experiences beyond such framings contribute to a deterioration
of democratic politics. Compounding matters is the growing normalisation of extremist
discourses of othering across certain 24-hour cable news channels, talk radio broadcasts,
and social media feeds and networks. Hyper-partisan, borderline hateful speech works
to demonise many of the most vulnerable in society, including the poor, or those who
are LGBTQ+, immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers or other minority groups. Jour-
nalism’s obligations to its diverse publics necessarily entail a duty of care to respect and
reaffirm ethical norms for public discussion and deliberation.
• In many countries around the world, local journalism is in a state of severe financial
distress, the implications most profoundly felt in communities struggling to maintain
a collective sense of civic identity and belonging. Lived truths of everyday interactions
fail to find adequate representation where it is a single, hollowed-out news organisation
– if there is one at all – operating at this level, typically lacking sufficient resources to
provide much by way of original, in-depth reporting (some weeklies becoming ‘ghost
newspapers’ reliant on repurposed copy). The term ‘news desert’ similarly speaks to
this precarity, the outcome of predatory corporate acquisitions amounting to ‘delo-
calization,’ that is, a diminishing number of outlets with dramatically reduced staff-
ing profiles, converged newsrooms (e.g., regional hubs), and curtailed expenditure on
place-bound news and information (LeBrun et al., 2022). In recognising a shared in-
terest in valuing on-the-ground facts over and above the flux of click-bait algorithms
driving profit maximisation, possibilities for alternative funding models to underwrite
the costs of reliable, quality local news are being explored through experimentation and

5
 Stuart Allan

innovation. Calibrating varied types of support – such as new monetisation strategies,

philanthropy, taxing tech platforms, and public funding (Buni, 2020) – to local priori-
ties affords new potentials for a more sustainable future.
• From the local to the global, journalists challenging the scourge of ‘fake news’ can find
themselves personally targeted. Online attacks, threats and intimidations are becoming
increasingly prevalent, particularly those aimed at women journalists. A UNESCO-
commissioned global study by Posetti et al. (2021) shows how some perpetrators aim to
‘weaponise misogyny’ to ‘belittle, humiliate, and shame; induce fear, silence, and re-
treat; discredit them professionally, undermining accountability journalism and trust in
facts,’ and in so doing, ‘chill their active participation (along with that of their sources,
colleagues and audiences) in public debate’ (2021: 6). Philippine journalist M ­ aria
Ressa, a co-winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize as noted above, is a cofounder of
the ­Manila-based online news website Rappler.com. In pursuing investigative report-
ing into violence and corruption in the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte,
she has faced constant political harassment and numerous arrests. ‘I stand before you, a
representative of every journalist around the world who is forced to sacrifice so much
to hold the line, to stay true to our values and mission,’ Ressa (2021) declared in her
Nobel speech. ‘Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust.
Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy,’ she continued, ‘and it becomes
impossible to deal with our world’s existential problems.’

These exigent crises are amongst many others where the politics of truth-seeking demand
urgent attention, provoking searching questions regarding how news and journalism must
evolve to deepen and extend public interest commitments.

This Volume
This is the critical juncture where this second edition of The Routledge Companion to News
and Journalism seeks to intervene. In so doing, it aims to build on the scholarship presented
in the first edition (which appeared in 2010 followed by an expanded, paperback edition in
2012), reassessing several longstanding themes while, at the same time, introducing fresh,
leading-edge perspectives on current and future challenges unfolding apace.
In its interdisciplinary purview, the Companion brings together scholars committed to the
conceptual and methodological development of news and journalism studies from around
the world. Each of the 50 chapters that follow, situated across seven sections, promises to of-
fer the reader a unique vantage point – at once theoretically-informed and evidence-based –
to pursue its mode of enquiry. In other words, this volume is not intended as an academic
treatment for its own sake. Rather, each chapter first poses one or more critical questions to
guide its approach, thereby engendering a lively debate over possible answers. Interweaving
close appraisals of academic research and journalistic forms, practices, and epistemologies,
the authors strive to further our understanding of the underlying factors giving shape to
complex developments of pressing significance.
Accordingly, this Companion examines the reasons why we have ended up with the kind
of news reporting we have today – its remarkable strengths as well as the formidable difficul-
ties it faces – with a view to exploring how we might improve upon it for tomorrow. While
even two editions together cannot be truly comprehensive in scope, care has been taken
to select topics which effectively blur familiar ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ divides to advantage,

6
 Introduction

thereby helping to ensure chapters will be useful in a wide array of research, teaching, pro-
fessional and activist contexts.
More specifically, in formulating its distinctive approach, the Companion presents the
following features:

• It is inclusive in the scope of its scholarship, offering a multiplicity of viewpoints on key

ideas, concepts, issues and debates which – taken together – provide an evaluative assess-
ment that is unique in breadth and depth. Given the shared commitment to reinvigorate
current scholarship, a value has been placed on innovative thinking so as to encourage
challenging, even counter-intuitive insights to emerge;
• Each chapter’s topic is question-led, as noted above, which is to say that it seeks to
address a ‘real world’ concern that casts light on an important dimension of news and
journalism to show why it matters. This approach aspires to anchor this volume’s effort
to make a contribution in its own right to the ongoing formalisation of this subject area;
• A recurrent theme evident throughout the Companion concerns journalism’s responsi-
bilities in a democracy. In the course of elucidating pertinent debates – including dig-
ital divisions and interactive inequalities, for example, or social exclusion where class,
gender, ethnicity, age and sexuality are concerned – the chapters are open to a range of
analytical frameworks that might otherwise fall outside of the domain of news or jour-
nalism studies more narrowly defined.
• In recognising the communicative connectivities of the local with the global, even those
chapters focused on news and journalism in one national context nevertheless invite in-
ternational comparisons to be made, thereby rendering problematic certain traditional,
typically Western, assumptions.

The animating ambition of this Companion, it follows, is not to set down the terms of debate,
but rather to inspire new forms of dialogue. In the remaining portion of this introductory
chapter, I shall briefly outline the rationale for the selection of topics by offering a few words
about the contents of each of the 50 chapters in turn. As will soon become apparent, alter-
native orderings present themselves, any one of which would create positive synergies. It is
hoped that the chosen structure will contribute to an over-arching narrative, however, one
that speaks to the intellectual formation of news and journalism studies while, at the same
time, stressing the value of re-envisioning scholarship with a critical eye to transformations
underway in and between professional and civic realms.

Structure and Contents

The opening section of the Companion, ‘Journalism and Democracy,’ illuminates important
features of wider debates about the news media’s responsibilities within public life. The first
chapter, by C.W. Anderson, assesses the continuing importance of the ‘public sphere’ as a
concept for news and journalism studies, arguing that its reinvigoration can facilitate efforts
to better understand journalism’s challenge to authoritarian systems of governance, includ-
ing identity-minded struggles for social justice. Normative appeals to the public sphere sim-
ilarly inform Kalyani Chadha’s chapter. She explores issues of press freedom in the context
of post-colonial India, questioning whether the country’s news media may be considered
a true, independent Fourth Estate. Peter Golding and Graham Murdock’s chapter adopts
a political economy approach to explain how the global forces driving marketisation and

7
 Stuart Allan

digitalisation have altered the organisation and practice of journalism, and thereby the con-
ditions of public access to communicative resources for active citizenship. The ‘crisis of pub-
lic knowledge’ they identify is approached from a complementary angle by Lana F. Rakow.
Here she examines the potential of ‘engaged journalism’ as means to address problems of
the public – drawing on the writings of John Dewey – in local governance so as to improve
democratic accountability.
In Chapter 4, Rachel E. Moran evaluates the current state of research into public trust in
journalism, opening up for deliberation the possibility (as contrary as it may sound) that dis-
trust may be vital in renewing journalism’s public and democratic orientation. Matt ­Carlson’s
chapter theorises journalism as a knowledge-producing institution, showing how and why
its epistemic authority – legitimising preferred ways of knowing the world – are implicated
in relations of social power. In striving to unpack how journalists make sense of their social
roles, Tim Vos investigates the extent to which they are institutionalised in the news they
produce. Of particular importance, he argues, is the place of the public in journalists’ under-
standing and performance of their roles in a democracy. Rounding out this section is Kristy
Hess and Lisa Waller’s chapter, which considers recent Australian government legislation
seeking to make Facebook and Google pay local news publishers for linking to their content
through a compulsory media bargaining code. Hess and Waller scrutinise the controversy
surrounding this international precedent, including the prospects for funding models to
support quality journalism.
In the Companion’s second section, ‘Rewriting the Rules of Reporting,’ the chapters re-
volve around a shared interest in delving into the seemingly common-sensical imperatives
shaping everyday news reportage. In centring objectivity for discussion, Michael Schudson
(Chapter 9) traces its historical inflections, revealing how journalism’s core in the US has
been profoundly influenced by the emergence of key literary and social practices, as well
as prevailing professional ideals. Taking us into the newsroom, Valérie Bélair-Gagnon and
Avery E. Holton’s chapter questions journalism’s growing reliance on web metrics and an-
alytics to personalise audience engagement. They identify certain advantages, but also risks
for newsroom cultures. Jing Meng and Shixin Ivy Zhang explore how digital journalism is
transitioning in China, specifying how state-driven policies of media convergence aimed at
supporting legacy media are also a political endeavour to reconnect with the public, partic-
ularly young people on social media.
Related issues of media convergence figure in Sakulsri Srisaracam’s chapter, which cri-
tiques the ‘double-edged sword of cross-media and transmedia journalism strategies’ in
Thailand’s newsrooms. ‘How can credibility, objectivity and fairness in journalism be bal-
anced with the need for speed,’ she asks, ‘in an environment of fragmented information
and the personalization of news?’ Melissa Wall’s chapter introduces the phenomenon of
‘pop up newsrooms,’ that is, the uses of short-term physical or even virtual spaces to host
temporary news production sites. In weighing their relative strengths and limitations, she
looks to see how different modes of ‘organizational sensemaking’ adapted by various pop
up newsrooms shape their practices and values. Linda Steiner and Dinfin Mulupi’s chapter
assesses the changing status of women journalists in the US. They show how the #MeToo
movement has thrown several issues into sharper relief, including women’s entry into the
profession, their roles in generating new styles of journalism, and their participation in pre-
viously male-dominated journalistic domains. In this section’s final chapter, Silvio ­Waisbord
examines the damaging impact of online trolling on journalists’ wellbeing and safety, par-
ticularly for women and minority reporters. To intervene against such forms of hate, he
suggests four lines of strategic action.

8
 Introduction

The chapters in Section Three, ‘News, Mobilities and Data,’ look beyond more tradi-
tional, technology-centred approaches in order to better account for the fluidly contin-
gent dynamics of journalistic mediation in the digital era. Allissa V. Richardson’s chapter
discusses Black peoples’ use of mobile devices to document police brutality in the US –
­teenager ­Darnella Frazier recording of George Floyd’s murder on her cellphone being a
powerful example – discerning how the counternarratives being created challenge the nor-
malisation of racism, including within news reporting at times. In considering the meanings
ascribed to mobility, Andrew Duffy and Oscar Westlund’s chapter invites a rethinking of
familiar assumptions about this concept for research into news production, distribution and
consumption. In concluding with a thought experiment, they ask: what would ‘be lost from
the news ecosystem if the smartphone became extinct?’ Growing concerns with the data-
fication of our social world instil urgency into the chapter by Arne Hintz, Emiliano Treré
and Naomi Owen, where they examine the history, characteristics and current trends of data
journalism with an eye to recasting certain reporting practices in the interest of data justice.
Brendan Lawson and An Nguyen (Chapter 19) use COVID-19 risk data to identify several
of the problems journalists confront when reporting on statistics, highlighting a number of
strategies to better align the numerical and the personal in news storytelling.
In elaborating the notion of ‘hybridity’ for journalism studies, Stephen D. Reese pin-
points a range of critiques as well as possible applications. With respect to the latter, he tests
several tenets in relation to journalists’ engagement with citizen-centred and professional
online investigations of the January 6, 2021 riot, when supporters of then President Donald
Trump stormed the US Capitol. The advent of podcasting as a distinctive journalistic genre
is Mia Lindgren’s focus, her chapter revealing how its privileging of personal voice subverts
traditional professional norms of objectivity. Self-reflective reporting, she argues, may sound
authentic and transparent, but it is constructed in performative terms, including to leverage
the intimacy of the medium. Jonas Harvard’s chapter traces the emergence of drones as a
journalistic tool, gauging the relative affordances and constraints associated with these ‘fly-
ing cameras’ for news organisations striving to generate visually compelling news reportage.
Where some regard drone journalism as a positive force for the democratisation of top-down
perspectives, he points out, others express alarm over its surveillance implications, not least
potential threats to privacy.
In Section Four, ‘Crisis, Conflict and War Reporting,’ the Companion presents a range of
contributions concerned with the news coverage of crisis events unfolding around the world.
In their evaluation of news reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sara C ­ hinnasamy and
Felipe F. Salvosa II bring to bear a range of perspectives from the Global South to discern
specific challenges. Such voices include those of news industry leaders, advocates and media
experts, as well as those of journalists themselves, their experiences helping to identify ex-
amples of best practices and innovative approaches. ‘Globalized crisis ecologies’ are addressed
by Ingrid Volkmer in her chapter’s analysis of risk journalism, with particular attention given
to the reporting of climate change. She explains why journalists need to look beyond nation
state-based coverage so as to take on more dynamic roles as cosmopolitan actors to better
communicate the increasingly interdependent sphere of globalised crises. Several related
themes chime with Sandra Ristovska’s chapter, which assesses how video journalism con-
cerned with human rights issues and war crimes is evolving to better verify, preserve, analyse
and curate eyewitness content. Three innovative groups – Bellingcat (an online open-source
network), Visual Investigations at the New York Times, and Forensic Architecture (a research
agency with a human rights focus) – are shown to be reimagining video practices in import-
ant ways.

9
 Stuart Allan

Lilie Chouliaraki and Omar Al-Ghazzi’s chapter is similarly concerned with first-person
experience, conceiving of user-generated content (UGC) as ‘flesh witnessing,’ that is, the
embodied, mobile testimonies of vulnerable others, typically enabled by smartphones, to
enter global news environments as appeals to attention and action. In elucidating the issues
at stake, they provide an analysis of the narrative strategies through which flesh witnessing
acquires truth-telling authority. The affectivities of voice similarly inform Donald Mathe-
son’s contribution, which brings to light varied aspects of ethical practice in war reporting.
Of particular interest to him is enlarging the scope for journalism to create spaces for public
knowledge and debate under conditions of conflict. Shahzad Ali and Ahmer Safwan offer
a critical appraisal of the pressures the Pakistani press has faced in covering the so-called
‘War on Terror’ since the September 11, 2001 attacks. In addition to scrutinising logistical
difficulties, they also consider the responsibility placed on the press to help ensure stability
in the region, and to project a positive image of Pakistan to the world. This section closes
with Stuart Allan’s chapter, which takes an iconic smartphone image of the US military’s
recent evacuation from Afghanistan to pose questions regarding photojournalism in the
early months of the war. To what extent is it possible to discern inscriptive relations of un/
seeing, he asks, inviting particular visualisations of conflict and its human consequences over
and above alternatives?
As its title ‘Representing Realities’ suggests, the fifth section of the Companion brings sev-
eral chapters concerned with news representation to the fore. In the opening chapter, Libby
Lester specifies the role news reporting plays – and could potentially play in future – in shap-
ing decisions to protect landscapes, species or ways of life embedded within local environ-
ments. In envisaging future scenarios, she devotes close attention to prospects for changing
practices related to new technologies, the visibility and influence of sources, and how publics
can be formed through journalism’s relationship with environmental concerns. ‘Why does
poverty so often fail to register on the news agenda?,’ asks Jairo Lugo-Ocando at the outset
of his chapter. In comparing possible reasons, he explicates several formative factors while,
at the same time, suggesting how newsroom practices may be strengthened to better inter-
rogate structural inequalities. News coverage of gendered violence – including rape, sexual
assault, intimate partner violence, and sexual harassment – has seen significant improvements
in recent decades, Lisa Cuklanz (Chapter 32) argues, although further deficiencies remain.
Journalism focused on solutions needs to unravel certain prejudicial mythologies, enweaving
sexism with racism in many instances, to overcome problematic framings that have proven
stubbornly persistent.
Erin Whiteside’s chapter addresses the representation of girls, women and gender-related
issues in sports journalism in the US. In discussing the challenge presented by the emergence
of what she terms ‘feminist sentiments surrounding women’s sports,’ she argues discrimina-
tion can be usefully critiqued through, firstly, analyses of intersectional forms of oppression,
and secondly, the incorporation of ‘a postfeminist sensibility’ in journalism scholarship. Anne
Jerslev and Mette Mortensen’s chapter seeks to understand the role and impact of celebrity
news in societal terms. Exploring questions of representation, they show how celebrities and
their managers strategise to gain visibility via social media, and then extend this performa-
tive work to secure newsworthy status for the ‘celebrity news circuit.’ In Cynthia Carter and
Kaitlynn Mendes’s chapter, feminist scholarship is encouraged to recognise the experiences
of girls in relation to journalism. Amongst the issues they investigate is the extent to which
certain binaries can be reproduced in the news, such as through gender norms whereby girls
are associated with emotions and domesticity, while boys are tacitly linked to rationality and
patriarchal structures of privilege. Tensions engendered by polarisation similarly inform the

10
 Introduction

remit for Laura Ahva’s chapter, where she argues scholars need to assist journalists in crafting
appropriate responses. To facilitate creative thinking, she centres for evaluation six reforma-
tory types of socially responsible journalism – that is, peace, public, constructive, solutions,
slow and conciliatory journalism – intended to help reduce the excessive polarisation of so
much public discussion.
‘Envisioning Alternative Journalisms,’ the sixth section of the Companion, aims to discern
for analysis the varied, uneven uses of news and journalism, that is, the ways in which they
are rendered meaningful for and by diverse publics within the contexts of everyday life.
Chris Peters’s chapter outlines how audience research has drawn on quantitative methods
to understand public preferences and behaviours towards journalism, and qualitative ap-
proaches to gauge sensemaking practices and feelings associated with news use. On the basis
of these findings, he reflects on what they might tell us about journalism’s relationship with
democracy, particularly in terms of civic engagement around public affairs. A tragic instance
where citizen video proved vital for news reporting is examined by Mary Angela Bock in her
chapter, namely a passer-by’s recording of 27-year-old African-American Walter W ­ allace
dying at the hands of Philadelphia police. She reveals the ways publicly shared images can
serve as discursive affordances for multiple stakeholders, bringing to the fore questions re-
garding the negotiation of power in visual framings of meaning. The features of ‘citizen
peace journalism’ in African contexts – Kenya and Zimbabwe – are accentuated by Jacinta
Maweu and Admire Mare in their chapter. Their assessment of the varied, important roles
played by otherwise peripheral actors in journalism to diffuse political tensions in two highly
contentious elections highlights what can be gained via co-operation between professionals
and citizen journalists. In a similar vein, Bolette B. Blaagaard’s chapter delves into journal-
ism’s mediation of counterpublics, a concept which she characterises as a response, in part, to
Habermasian ideals of the public sphere. Two counterpublics receive particular attention -
the feminist movement emergent under the hashtag #metoo, and the civil rights movement
Black Lives Matter (BLM) – to inspire a provocative reconsideration of precisely who it is
mainstream journalism is addressing, and why.
The notion of ‘infodemic’ briefly introduced above is further developed in Paul Mihailid-
is’s chapter, which distinguishes several factors behind the growing demand for news literacy
in support of a more self-reliant, action-taking citizenry. In a news ecology where misinfor-
mation and disinformation undermine public trust, he argues the ways in which we prepare
publics for critical engagement with news has never been more important for civic cultures.
In their chapter’s enquiry into journalism’s treatment of ethnoracial minorities, Sherry S. Yu
and George L. Daniels make the case for reconceptualising alternative forms and practices
of ‘ethnic journalism’. Longstanding types of repression are being re-inflected under the
conditions of digitisation, they point out, demanding a wider conversation about how best to
find progressive ways forward. In thinking of journalism students as change agents, Marcel
Broersma and Jane B. Singer’s chapter illuminates a number of ways in which journalism
education is responding to demands for innovation from the news industry, including the
need for fresh ideas in the newsroom to attract new readers, listeners and viewers. Drawing
on survey and interview data with journalism students, the chapter explores their motiva-
tions, and also perceptions regarding journalistic innovation and entrepreneurialism, so as to
provide insights into how the boundaries of news reporting are being redrawn.
The final section of the Companion, ‘Globalising Journalisms,’ rounds out this volume’s
discussion, its title recognising the cultural specificity of varied definitions of what counts
as ‘journalism’ in different national contexts. In striving to diversify more traditional un-
derstandings of journalistic cultures, Folker Hanusch’s chapter disrupts ‘the field’s Western

11
 Stuart Allan

bias’ to assess the value of contextualist approaches. In studying journalistic cultures com-
paratively, he argues, questions such as ‘who is a journalist in the digital age?’ assume fresh
significance, with far-reaching implications for scholarship. The future of journalism in
Japan is envisioned by David McNeill and Kaori Hayashi in their chapter, describing how
news-gathering is undergoing a profound transition ‘with the old citadels of print and broad-
cast media now crumbling.’ Japan’s weekly news magazines warrant close attention in this
regard, they suggest, particularly the emergence of more confrontational types of reporting
in monitoring abuses of power. Similar themes resonate in Saba Bebawi’s chapter, which
appraises processes of cultural change in Arab investigative journalism. Having first traced
its historical emergence, including several obstacles impeding its ongoing evolvement, she
highlights data journalism’s potential for fostering alternative cultures of reporting.
Theory-building concerned with journalism and the Global South, Bruce Mutsvairo
and Kristin Skare Orgeret maintain in their chapter, necessarily entails radical re-­
conceptualisations of journalistic roles and responsibilities. In developing this mode of enquiry,
they pinpoint how regionally-based foci generate heuristic benefits, not only for scholarship,
but also for improving journalism’s prospects in the Global South to better ensure its sus-
tainability. ­A nti-press violence in Latin America is centred in Mireya Márquez-Ramírez’s
chapter. She first identifies the factors behind the dangers experienced by journalists at risk of
being targeted in the region, then assesses how a diverse array of coalitions, collectives, and
allies have mobilised to help protect them. Threats to the safety of local stringers and fixers
in international journalism are documented in Lyndsay Palmer’s chapter, which shows how
their disadvantaged position in professional hierarchies so often means their labour is deval-
ued to the point of being almost invisible to news audiences. Journalism scholarship must
avoid inadvertently reifying these inegalitarian power relations, which can be achieved – as
she demonstrates – by actively engaging with these news workers’ own perspectives, atti-
tudes and ideas about international journalism. And lastly, Claudia Mellado’s chapter extends
the section’s themes by examining journalistic cultures on social media platforms. Insights
from a range of studies, including her own research into how Chilean journalists manage
their digital identities on Twitter and Instagram, enable her to propose new ways forward in
the investigation of possible disconnects between journalists’ ideals and their performance. A
fitting note, then, on which to bring the Companion’s discussion to a close.

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iraqis-remember-painful-war-memories

13
 PART I

Journalism and Democracy

 1
NEWS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
C.W. Anderson

What is there to say about journalism and the public sphere today? By some accounts, the
entire concept is an outdated relic – of an earlier era in theory, or in terms of lived, empirical
reality, or both. By other accounts, the concept has been picked over and written to death,
with little that is new to say beyond the synthesis of a massive amount of increasingly spe-
cialized literature. This would seem to make the work involved in the writing of this chapter
an exercise in either scholasticism, futility, or both.
From a current vantage point, however, we have sufficient critical distance from the orig-
inal formulation of the ‘public sphere’ concept to think clearly about its historicity, why it
appealed to a great many people who studied journalism in the aftermath of the Cold War,
and the ways in which it should be critiqued today. Through these lenses, we can better
understand the ways in which it might still speak to our present moment. This chapter thus
leaves a great deal off to the side – there is little mention of Hannah Arendt, of Tocqueville,
of coffee houses, of early organs of opinion journalism like The Tattler or The Spectator, and
so forth. The usual cast of characters (Habermas, Dewey, Nancy Fraser, and so forth) are
seen here more as embedded historical actors responding to the challenges of their time,
actors who were then picked up and appropriated by other thinkers who were also actors.
The chapter, finally, moves between two poles: discussions of high German theory, on the
one hand, and the more modern encounter with racism, classism, sexism, transphobia, and
the ways these have implicated the press, on the other. Journalism, quite purposefully, sits in
the middle of these two poles. It is through this oscillation between the intellectually arid
and the brutally real that I think we can best understand the relevance of the public sphere
for journalism today.
The chapter begins by tracing the origins of the public sphere concept to a moment of
transition in the world of German philosophy. More specifically, it examines its conceptual
origins at the nexus of German idealism, Critical Theory, and a more linguistically-inclined,
pragmatic Anglo-American philosophical tradition. The second section traces the history
of the reception of the public sphere concept, elucidating the way that it became enrolled
in journalism and media research (an area that is almost entirely absent from Habermas’s
mature social theory). The third and final section discusses how today’s modern intellectual
concerns, specifically those surrounding the growth of authoritarian systems of governance

DOI: 10.4324/9781003174790-317
 C.W. Anderson

and the rise of identity-minded struggles for social justice, might helpfully modify our un-
derstanding the relationship between journalism, the media, and the public sphere.

The Origins of the Concept of the “Public Sphere”

Most commentary on Habermas, in discussing his intellectual background, tends to focus on
his apprenticeship under Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, the two most important
members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. It may be more accurate, however,
to see Habermas as more interested in rescuing the Kantian notion of a meaningful post-­
metaphysical rationality that can serve as the basis for a democratic politics. His work on the
public sphere, coming quite early in his career, was the most “Hegelian” of these attempts at
a resurrection of rationality and thus maintains quite an uneasy relationship with his larger
intellectual oeuvre. Students of communication and journalism studies thus tend to know an
aspect of Habermas that bears only a tenuous relationship with his larger intellectual project.
It is a strange thing for a theorist to be famous, in a major academic subfield, for their first
major work.
Habermas defines what he means by public sphere in a 1964 encyclopedia article that is
a masterpiece of concision. Since it covers such a vast amount of ground in Habermas’s own
words, I will quote that article at length:

By “the public sphere” we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which some-
thing approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens.
A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private
individuals assemble to form a public body. They then behave neither like business or
professional people transacting private affairs, nor like members of a constitutional order
subject to the legal constraints of a state bureaucracy. Citizens behave as a public body
when they confer in an unrestricted fashion-that is, with the guarantee of freedom of
assembly and association and the freedom to express and publish their opinions-about
matters of general interest. In a large public body this kind of communication requires
specific means for transmitting information and influencing those who receive it. Today
newspapers and magazines, radio and television are the media of the public sphere.
(Habermas 1964 [1974])

Habermas key work on this topic, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, describes
the historical evolution – the “rise and fall” – of the ideal public sphere characterized by
the values noted above. It, documents how this institutionally fixed space of conversation,
reason-giving, and augmentation about public topics came to be corrupted by the growth
of the mass media and the power of the administrative state (Habermas 1989). In its histo-
ricity and dialectical construction, this theory of the public sphere bears the clearest mark
of Habermas’s original apprenticeship with the Frankfurt School. It is, in a sense, Hegelian,
both in the way it places philosophical concepts in time but also in the ways that it social-
izes notions of rationality. It turns notions of reason into a discursive construct grounded,
in Terry Pinkard’s (2002) words, in “participating in a historical, social practice of giving
and asking for reasons, not in an appeal to something outside of us that sorts the world
for us prior to our deliberations” (2002, 242). As Habermas himself notes, Hegel breaks
with a “mentalist” frame of understanding human reason that stretched at least from Des-
cartes to Kant. It was Hegel that understood “the most significant feature of the historical
world is the symbolic structure of what actors, speakers and believers intersubjectively share:

18
 News and the Public Sphere

world-views, mentalities and traditions, values, norms and institutions, social practices and,
more generally, cultural forms of life” (Habermas 2002). For Habermas, these intersubjec-
tive rationalities manifested themselves institutionally in what he called “the public sphere,”
a distinct realm that unfolded dialectically but eventually collapsed due to the weight of its
own internal contradictions (note the similarities to a Marxist dialectic here).
As Craig Calhoun (1992) notes in an overview of the concept that is almost as well-
known as the original work itself, this institutional, dialectical focus is something of
dead end within Habermas’s own theory (1992, 29–35). The historical evidence for
­H abermas’s notion of the public sphere is sketchy (Schudson 1992). He himself admits
that he was wrong about the fundamental notion of a single public sphere, especially
one that excluded women (Fraser 1992). Questions of the counter-culture are left un-
examined (Keith 2019). As Calhoun (1992) puts it, “the public sphere that has attracted
attention in the United States since the book’s translation and publication in English has
become for Habermas more a historical curiosity than an ongoing theoretical project”
(1992, 34). Nevertheless, Habermas remains concerned with many of the same issues that
he first addressed in the 1960s – the relationship between democracy and reason and the
need to ground reason in a dialogical and communicative context, rather than a property
that adheres within a single “mind.”
The next set of questions I want to address, then, are meta-theoretical. What was it about
the late 1980s, 1990s, and even the early 2000s that made an abandoned work of politi-
cal theory, one published in German more than three decades earlier, seem so relevant to
­A nglo-American research concerns, especially those within media sociology and journalism
studies? Given that Habermas has pursued other avenues for addressing similar underlying
theoretical questions, does his more recent work speak to us still – perhaps even more so than
the question of the public sphere? And is there anything that remains within the original
impetus for Habermas’s more sociological notion of the public sphere that might prove useful
with the challenges we face today?

The Public Sphere as a Communications Keyword

Why did The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere make such an impact in the
­A nglo-American academic world nearly three daces after its original publication, especially
in the fields of political communication and journalism studies? Every successful book has
its moment, a moment in which changes in the larger academic culture and events in the
world combined with a mode of thought that seems not only capable of explaining what is
going on but also of providing a structure in which to ask the new questions that suddenly
seem relevant. The epochal event at the time of the translation of Habermas’s book was, of
course, the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the end of the Soviet Union,
and the larger discrediting of the Marxist political project. Most exciting, perhaps, was how
the Iron Curtain fell; led not by oppressed internal minorities, “the proletariat,” or the
threatened force of American arms but rather seemingly bloodlessly, powered by men and
women who were most of all speakers, debaters, and arguers. Timothy Garton Ash’s (1990)
The Magic Lantern, with its description of subversive meeting clubs and discussion groups led
by poets and playwrights, did much to reinforce this legacy, as did the shock and speed of
the collapse itself. In this environment, it was natural that a book about the political power
of autonomous “public talk” would not only capture the intellectual imagination but also
provide some explanatory value in understanding why the Eastern European regimes fell (for
a much more detailed overview of this same topic, see Turner 2009).

19
 C.W. Anderson

Not only did the theories of the public sphere provide a framework for understanding
revolutionary events empirically, they also served as a bridge between older currents of
Marxist theory and newer concepts related to identity and difference, as well as the auton-
omy (or not) of the public realm. Habermas’s Structural Transformation was itself something of
a “bridge” itself located between the critical Marxism of the Frankfurt School (Habermas’s
teachers) and his more mature turn to the pragmatics of speech acts; it is sensible, then, that
the book would itself play this role in the larger intellectual community after the fall of the
Berlin Wall. A generation of critical scholars was suddenly left intellectually homeless by
the collapse of the Marxist political project and the impact of that collapse on their larger
theoretical worldview (Lukes 1992). Theories of the public sphere may have seemed like
a potential substitute. Structural Transformation was a way to continue asking big questions
about the possibilities of human freedom and the way that these possibilities were blocked by
money and administrative power – one that retained only faint touches of its Marxist legacy,
however. For scholars of journalism, Habermas’s theory played a particularly powerful role
in guiding the liberalism vs communitarianism debate that followed the end of the commu-
nist project. Scholars such as James Carey (Carey 2007; Pooley 2016) and Jay Rosen (Rosen
1999) drew on Habermas’s concept of the public sphere to advance their own understanding
of journalism that saw it as a primarily dialogical rather than informational practice.
Habermas’s theories of the public served as a negative theoretical example in another major
intellectual debate that dominated the American intellectual scene in the 1990s and early
2000s, namely the debate over questions of universals (universal “justice,” rights,” “reason,”
and so forth) versus a focus on difference, exclusion, and inequality (indebted to feminism,
post-structuralism, and critical race theory). Among the most fervent and critically devastat-
ing responses to Habermas’s theories of unitary public sphere were essays penned by Nancy
Fraser (1992) and Michael Warner (1992), both of whom took issue with the idea that there
ever existed a single public sphere that was not marked by extreme exclusion. This histor-
ical disagreement served as the backdrop to a more profound and philosophical argument,
one where the very normative ideal of “the public” in the way Habermas understood it was
called into question. As Holub (1994) notes, in a perceptive article about Habermas’s Amer-
ican reception, the cultural background and important questions asked by these different
traditions are simply different:

Dominating large circles of theory in the United States are issues that have been rather
marginal for Habermas’s universalistic discourse. A native tradition dealing with the
status of women, of minorities, of sexuality, and of ethnicity—in short, a theoretical
enterprise focused on difference—has tended to pose different questions to Habermas’s
work than he has had to confront in Germany, and this tradition has often had greater
affinity with the very postmodernists about whom Habermas harbors misgivings …
people are different, and that these differences— whether attributed to culture, gender,
ethnicity, race, or even biological factors—prohibit us from postulating a universality
with regard to conduct or to adjudicating appropriate standards for conduct.
(Holub 1994, 6)

These concerns with difference dominate the responses of Fraser, Warner, and the many
others in these traditions who have grappled with Habermas’s original work.
But perhaps the two single biggest factors that led to the late but meteoric reception of
Habermas for media scholars had to do with the emergence of the internet and the field

20
 News and the Public Sphere

of journalism studies. In the case of the former, the sudden popularization of this entirely
new medium of communication made readily apparent how its very nature seemed to be
both dialogical and structurally open (Wertheim 2000). It called out for a theory that paid
close attention to the conditions under which free and democratic communication might
occur, asking whether “the internet” might be considered such a space. This led to ava-
lanche of books and articles asking the question “is the internet a public sphere?” Friedland
et al. (2006) led the way, arguing that the public sphere was in fact a digital, networked
artifact, one through which the kind of reciprocal exchange envisioned by Habermas
might take place, but only with substantial modification of Habermas’s neo-Parsonian
sociological framework. In the negative, Jodi Dean (2003) countered bluntly that “The
net is not a public sphere,” arguing (presciently, many might say) that not only was the
internet not a public sphere but that its architecture and financial model would be dam-
aging to the kind of democracy Habermas envisioned. danah boyd brought social media
sites into the mix with an article on networked publics (2010), and RLH Lewis (2012)
drew powerfully on the work of Catherine Squires (2002) in his history of the website The
Root and the role it has played in fostering a black public sphere. Most recently, Eli Pariser
(2009) problematized the notion of digitally open communication on the web by drawing
attention to the ways in which algorithmic ranking might “filter bubbles” that sort citizens
into self-­reinforcing grouplets with similar beliefs, thus lowering the possibility of genuine
exchange based on different opinion.
Underlying all these debates about the internet lay the emergence of journalism studies
as an academic field, which roughly coincided with the rise of the mass internet. In draw-
ing on interdisciplinary research areas – interweaving sociology, political communication,
cultural studies, and science and technology studies – it was always marked by its implicitly
or explicitly normative focus. Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, despite its rather prob-
lematic understanding of journalism, seemed to be a perfect normative theory with which
to measure the democratic success or failure of the work reporters performed. Any one of
several positions on what journalism ought to do could fit under the Habermasian umbrella:
did journalism provide enough information so citizens would be knowledgeable enough to
discuss important issues? Did it allow them the space to debate issues in the first place? Did
it allow difference to be recognized yet overcome in a higher synthesis of informed reason,
recognizing the force of the better argument? For a relatively new field in search of its own
standard for what constituted “good” journalism, the dense and extremely philosophical
work of a radical (but not too radical) German theorist, one who discussed newspapers,
communication, and the media, must have seemed like a perfect fit.
From this, two conclusions follow. First, the relationship between journalism studies and
the public sphere is overdetermined, with historical, theoretical, normative, and disciplinary
traditions all making the importation of Habermas into communication analysis a relatively
easy import. Second, the temporal context in which public sphere theory became so salient
to the study of news has clearly passed. No one honestly thinks that the internet is a public
sphere in any serious way in the second decade of the 21st century. Dean’s (2003) early eval-
uation now seems, if anything, too utopian. Journalism, too, bears little relationship to the
kind of news institution that existed in the 1980s and early 1990s, to say nothing of the 1960s
when Structural Transformation was written. The question, then, seems clear: Does public
sphere theory have anything to offer to the theorists or practitioners of journalism today? Or
is it a relic, a perspective that continues to thrive thanks to its high citation count but is, for
all intents and purposes, a dead theory? The answer to this question, I will argue in the final

21
 C.W. Anderson

section, depends on how we understand Habermas’s theoretical origins and the unresolved
question of how notions of the public sphere fit into his larger oeuvre.

The Public Sphere and Journalism Today

There is little doubt that in the last decade, journalism has faced a reckoning (Callison and
Young 2020; see also Richardson 2020; Usher 2020; Zelizer et. al. 2021), with citizens crit-
icizing the overwhelmingly white-centric framing of most news coverage, and scholars cri-
tiquing the largely hegemonic normative focus of much journalism studies (Chakravartty et al.
2018). What’s more, mainstream journalism and the social media platforms that dominate
most online space have both been accused of facilitating the rise of Donald Trump, engaging
in genocide-fueling hate speech, and peddling “fake news,” and disinformation. Clearly, the
academic discourse about politics and the news has changed a great deal since the late 1980s,
and empirical reality has changed as well. Going back and reading the academic articles on the
public sphere throughout most of the 1990s and early 2000s, it is hard to miss the latent liberal
triumphalism and the dismissal of immanent critique that even the most radical pieces of today
are forced to grapple with (Browne 2008). Given all this, is the idea(l) of the public sphere still
meaningful? Or is it an artifact of an early, perhaps more optimistic time?
I would argue that this conception of the public sphere can still speak to journalists, schol-
ars, and citizens, but only by discarding much of Habermas’s own sociological and historical
analysis and returning to his Hegelian and Kantian roots. Specifically, how we understand
Habermas as a philosopher (and not a “journalism studies” or “communication” scholar) can
help us grapple with the larger issues central to the public sphere in the 21st century, partic-
ularly the dilemmas of racial justice, disinformation, and fake news.
As I have written elsewhere (Anderson 2020), the study of what has been variously de-
scribed as “fake news,” “disinformation,” or “misinformation” has reached a fever pitch
within the journalism studies and academic community. All too often, this research has been
approached from a strict media effects perspective – does misinformation cause message re-
cipients to behave in democratically debilitating ways, and can anything be done to counter
this tide of fake news? Even in less behavioristic ways, however, this understanding of fake
news draws on what Habermas has called the “mentalist” perspective of social thought:

The epistemological turn that we connect with Descartes starts from the question of
how we can reassure ourselves that we are at all capable of achieving knowledge. This
leads to a new conceptualization of knowledge in terms of a subject’s possession of
‘ideas’ of objects. The innovation is indicated by the third term, idea or ‘representation’,
that now mediates between the knowing subject and the world. While the subject is
one who has representings of objects, the world contains everything that can be rep-
resented by a subject for itself. The knowing subject is identified with a self or an ego.
This conception of self-reference has major implications; it allows for an answer to
the epistemological question of how we can acquire second-order knowledge of how
we gain first-order knowledge of objects. This is possible in virtue of self-reflection,
reflection on myself as a subject having ideas or representations of whatever objects. In
representing my representings, I disclose an internal space, called subjectivity. Thus, the
sphere of consciousness is intertwined with self-consciousness right from the beginning.
[Habermas 2002]

22
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 CHAPTER XVI
THE LAST OF THE GREAT TARNOV CRYSTAL

J oseph and his father were still kneeling when there came
unexpectedly a certain happening that changed the whole
complexion of the day. It came from the alchemist.
He had been listening attentively through all the talk, he had
followed back and forth the give-and-take of conversation, the
balancing of argument, the gestures, the decisions, even though his
eyes had seemed but half open. Just at this final moment he sprang
up from his place behind the others like a dog leaping for a bone,
and snatched the Tarnov Crystal out of the hands of the King.
Gripping it, he rushed like one gone wholly mad straight for the
door, brushing aside a guard who fell back in astonishment.
“Stop him,” cried Jan Kanty, “he will do something desperate.”
They might better have tried to stop the wind. He was through the
door and out on the balcony and down the steps to the court below,
where the guards, though astonished, had yet no pretext for seizing
him since he was an honored guest, one of the party of Jan Kanty.
Through the little entrance to the court he went at top speed, just as
the King, the scepter bearers, and the guards, followed by Pan
Andrew and Joseph, with Jan Kanty behind, raced along the balcony
and shouted to the guards below. These at once set out in pursuit,
shouting in turn to guards at the farther gates. But the alchemist was
traveling like a hurricane, and passing the men at arms at the very
entrance to the castle, he was off down the slope to the meadows
below where he swung to the left and bore toward the spot where
the Vistula curves about the base of the Wawel.
 Pan Andrew and Joseph continued in pursuit with the guards, but
the King with Jan Kanty, seeing the alchemist’s direction, hurried to
the extreme end of the fortifications where one looks down directly to
the river. At the very water’s edge the alchemist turned and
beckoned to his pursuers to stop, threatening by his motions to throw
himself into the current which at that time of the year was swollen
and swift. They paused, helpless, waiting until he chose to speak.
“Listen,” he cried, gazing first at the pursuing party that stood not
far distant from him on the shore, and then directly upward where
Jan Kanty and the King were leaning over the wall.
A curious figure he presented as he stood there for a moment in
silence, his garments sadly disordered, his hair twitched hither and
thither by the wind, his features working from emotion—the globe of
amazing beauty in his hands.
“Listen!” His voice now rose shrill and screaming. “It was I that
stole the crystal from Pan Andrew. The first sight of it drove honesty
from my head as it has driven honesty from the heads of many who
have seen it. I saw there all that magicians and astrologers of all
ages have devoutly wished for. I saw there the means of working out
a great name for myself, of becoming famous, of becoming envied
over all the world. I was tempted and I fell, but I shall see to it that no
more trouble comes from this accursed stone.”
He paused, overcome by the effort of so much speaking, but in a
second a flood of wild laughter burst from him. “There was the
student Tring,” he shouted, “yes, Tring—who used to be my student.
Because I looked so much into the crystal my mind grew weak and
he knew and I knew. It was he who said that if we but possessed the
secret of turning brass into gold then we should have power without
stint, and it was he who first directed me to read in the glass what
formula I might find therein for such magic. What did I find there? . . .
Only the reflections of my own crazed brain. And at last between us
we have done nothing but cause want and misery and suffering all
over Krakow. It is because of our madness that half the city is now
but a heap of ashes, that men and women and children are
homeless and in poverty.”
 With these words his voice shrank to a wail, and he stood, a
pitiful figure, his shoulders drooping, and his face turned toward the
ground.
“Cease, man! We are thy friends,” shouted the scholar.
“Nay. Such as I have no friends. But”—his shoulders suddenly
straightened—“with such jewels as this that cause strife between
man and man, and war between nation and nation—here—now—I
make an end!”
Then raising himself to such a height that for a moment he
appeared to be a giant, he swung about and hurled the crystal into
the air with all his force.
The sun struck it there as it seemed for a moment to hang
between earth and sky like a glittering bubble or a shining planet.
Then it fell, fell, fell—until it dropped with a splash into the black,
hurried waters of the Vistula River, so that the circles for a moment
beat back the waves of the rushing torrent—then all was as before.
Deep silence fell upon the onlookers. There was in the man’s act
something solemn, something unearthly, something supernatural—
his emotion was so great and the crystal had been such a beauteous
thing; and when Jan Kanty said, “Let us pray,” the whole company
fell upon their knees. When he had finished a simple prayer they
went forward and took up the alchemist where he had fallen, for he
had dropped down as if he had been suddenly overcome by a
sickness. They carried him back to the tower of the Church of Our
Lady Mary where his niece and Pan Andrew’s wife watched over
him.

Meanwhile the King called the scholar into conference, and after
much parley, and much weighing of pros and cons, it was decided
that no attempt should be made to rescue the crystal from the bed of
the river. There had been in its history too much of suffering and
misfortune to make it a thing at all desirable to possess, in spite of
the purity of its beauty.
 And should its hiding place become known—should a foreign
power again seek to obtain it, what chance had such a power with
the King’s army and the fortified city of the Wawel forever ready in its
defense? Surely never had treasure a safer resting place.
And so to this day it has never been disturbed, though in later
centuries many men have sought for it, and it rests somewhere in
the Vistula River near the Wawel, where the alchemist, Kreutz, threw
it in the year 1462.
Pan Andrew received from the state enough recompense to
rebuild his house in the Ukraine and he repaired there that same
year, taking with him Elzbietka and the alchemist who was broken in
health for a long time as the result of his experiences. When he
came to his senses a few days after he had thrown the crystal into
the river, he had returned to his right mind fully though he had no
remembrance of the dark scenes in which he had played a part. The
student Tring must have left for his home in Germany directly after
the fire, for he was never seen again in Krakow. In later years he
gained some fame in his own native village by the practice of magic,
in which it was said that he often called upon the devil himself for
assistance.
Joseph continued his studies in the university until he reached his
twenty-second year, and then he returned to the Ukraine to manage
his father’s estates. He was shortly afterward married to Elzbietka,
the friend of his boyhood days. . . . And now since we have come to
the happy end of all things in this tale, may we close with the thought
that every Pole carries in his mind—with the words that are foremost
in the Polish National Hymn:

May God Save Poland

 EPILOGUE
THE BROKEN NOTE

I t is the year 1926. The Vistula River now no longer turns at the
Wawel Hill and plunges straight through the Krakow plain dividing
the city of Kazimierz from the city of Krakow, but instead swings
far to the left and surrounds the whole plain, now the new city. The
castles and towers and cathedral of the Wawel still rise proudly on
the hill as in former days; St. Andrew’s which has defied fire, siege,
and war for eight centuries raises its head—two towers—above
Grodzka Street; the old Cloth Hall, beautified during the
Renaissance, still stands in the middle of the central Rynek. And
although the glory of former days is departed from the city and the
kings no longer sit in the castle on the hill, there has come with the
years the growth of a new glory, the glory of culture as seen in the
university of fourteenth century origin, in the schools of fine arts and
music and handicraft and trade. From all Poland come students to
study and to live in this venerable city, which is Gothic in every
corner and every gable save where here and there a bit of
Romanesque wall or arch has survived the Tartar, or the Cossack, or
the Swede.
But the chief glory of the city is the Church of Our Lady Mary. It
no longer stands apart, a monument visible from afar as of old—
other palaces and buildings have shut it in, and one sees its towers
only, until one is close upon it. Then the sudden magnificence leaps
upon the visitor. A splendid silence lurking in its high roof descends
suddenly like the thousands of pigeons that thunder down for
particles of bread. Beneath one’s feet is the old city cemetery; there
on the walls are the tablets and shrines; there at the south doorway
are the iron collars that once clasped the throats of petty criminals as
they stood supplicating the prayers and pennies of the faithful.
Inside, the church is a veritable miracle of beauty. Above its exquisite
wood carvings and choir rises a vaulted roof of sky blue, studded
with stars. Images of stone look down from breaks in the Gothic
fluting—tablets, banners, altars, shrines all strike alike upon the sight
in amazing beauty.
But listen: is the organ playing? Whence come those notes that
float down from above like God’s own music from heaven? They
come from the towers, for the hour is striking on the bell, and a
trumpeter is playing at one of the open tower windows. And that
tune? It is the Heynal, the same tune played by a young man so
many centuries ago when the Tartars burned the city—and listen, the
trumpeter breaks off his song in the middle of a note. . . . Four times
he sounds the Heynal, once at each of the four windows, west,
south, east, north. And many a man or woman or child on hearing
that song thinks of the days when the young life was given to country
and God and duty. . . . Poland has been through many fires since
that time—she has had centuries of war, a century of extinction. But
in all that time the Heynal has sounded with each passing hour and
men have sworn each year to keep the custom unto the very end of
time. Hark, it is sounding now.
May it bring in an epoch of peace to all men!
 NOTES

T he author wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to the

following persons for their services in aiding his research:
Professor Roman Dyboski of the English Department of the
University of Krakow; Director Frederic Papee of the university
library, and his assistants, Dr. Sophia Ameisen and Dr. Wojciech
Gelecki; Director Adam Chmiel of the Old Archives Building; Miss
Helene d’Abancour de Franqueville of the library of the Krakow
Academy; Miss Helena Walkowicz, a student in the university, and
Madame Sophia Smoluchowska of Krakow.
The Aqua Phosphorata mentioned on page 108 was a luminous
liquid compounded by the alchemist. Phosphorus as we know it to-
day was first made by Brandt in 1699. In 1602, however, Scipio
Begatello exploited the qualities of the famous Bologna Stone and its
luminous qualities, discovered by Vincenzo Cascariolo about 1595,
and there are other suggestions that similar substances were used
by earlier alchemists and magicians.
In the illustrations Miss Pruszynska has followed faithfully
fifteenth and sixteenth century models. Two old volumes, the Codex
of Baltazar Behem in the University Library, and the Pontifical Ciolka
in the Czartoryski Museum, Krakow, have furnished the models for
the dress, architecture, customs, and colors. For greater detail in
dress, the book of the celebrated Polish artist, Matejko, Costumes in
Poland of Other Days, was the authority. The decorations of the
illustrations are in the style of the Wit Stwosz altarpieces of the
Church of Our Lady Mary.
In the Iuramenta or Book of Oaths in the Old Archives of the City
of Krakow may be found the modified oath of the Krakow trumpeters
as it existed in the year 1671. It had been enlarged and translated
from Latin into Polish. In 1740 the Book of Oaths was rebound in the
form in which it now exists. Appended is a translation of the oath.

IURAMENTUM TUBICINIS

“I swear to Almighty God that I will be obedient to their

honors the gentlemen of the Krakovian council, and faithful
to the whole city in the service which I render with the
trumpet, also that I will be diligent scrupulously in keeping
watch, to the extent of my duties, to wit: the sounding of the
alarm of fire whenever and wherever it appears, in the city,
or behind the city, likewise to sound upon the trumpet the
hours of the night and day (appointed), and without the
permission of his honor the Burgomaster I will sound the
trumpet at no man’s request. I will be clean in all things and
watch the fires in the tower. And all this observe which
belongs to my duties, so help me God.”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been

corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has
been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious
printer errors occur.
[The end of The Trumpeter of Krakow by Eric Philbrook Kelly]
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