victor pickard democracy without journalism

According to such narratives, this landscape tends to create a more equitable and open space for news producers and consumers, one that is left unfettered by the state.

This oversight is also symptomatic of a broader technocentric discourse that imagines the digital media landscape as a wild terrain of disruptive innovation with little governmental oversight. Many factors contribute to this neglect, including the marginalized position of political economic approaches to media within the broader field of communications, as well as the often-invisible nature of media policies and other structural factors that shape journalistic practices and institutions. Today these long-term defects have metastasized.Ĭritical questions about the ownership, control, and regulation of media institutions are often given insufficient attention in digital journalism scholarship. The market never supported the levels of journalism-especially local, international, policy, and investigative reporting-that a healthy democracy requires. While professionalization was meant to resolve tensions between journalism’s public service and profit imperatives, Pickard argues that it merely camouflaged deeper structural maladies. The rise of a “misinformation society” is symptomatic of historical and endemic weaknesses in the American media system tracing back to the early commercialization of the press in the 1800s. The problem isn’t just the loss of journalism or irresponsibility of Facebook, but the very structure upon which our profit-driven media system is built. By uncovering degradations caused by run-amok commercialism, he brings into focus the historical antecedents, market failures, and policy inaction that led to the implosion of commercial journalism and the proliferation of misinformation through both social media and mainstream news. In Democracy Without Journalism? Victor Pickard argues that we’re overlooking the core roots of the crisis.

Victor pickard democracy without journalism