Before The Shooting Begins by James Davison Hunter

Author:James Davison Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1994-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bernstein concludes that the problem is linked to arrogance. “We have failed,” he says, “to open up our own institutions in the media to the same kind of scrutiny that we demand of other powerful institutions in the society. We are no more forthcoming or gracious in acknowledging error or misjudgment than the congressional miscreants and bureaucratic felons we spend so much time scrutinizing.” 45

The Obvious Question

“The real value that we have to add as the media is to give people the information they need to make up their own minds.” 46 This statement, made by a colleague of David Shaw’s at the Los Angeles Times, speaks directly to the problem at hand of how citizens become competent for enlightened participation in a democracy. Jefferson could not have said it better. The question her statement implies is pointed: how well can people make up their own minds if the information they receive is, for the most part, both shallow and often tendentious?

It would be foolish to generalize about the conduct of the press from this discussion. Clearly on some issues the press betrays a conservative bias; on other issues it has demonstrated heroic feats of fairness as well as serious, thoughtful, and probing reporting. But on this issue at least, one cannot shake a measure of doubt that the press has not been, as Jefferson put it, “the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man.” A journalistic establishment that does not go beneath the superficiality that too frequently characterizes public discourse concerning the culture war will be part of the problem rather than part of the solution (and resolution) of the conflicts dividing us. Is it any better within other institutions of civil society?

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