News and the empowerment of citizens

Lewis debates the issues with the nature of news, suggesting that it needs to be re-examined. He implies that citizenship should be a prominent priority for journalists, rather than a peripheral one. He explores the question of “how might journalism serve us better?”, illustrating that news should be about citizens within the community or assumed social concerns of these citizens.

Lewis explores the concept of the ‘Public Sphere’, drawing attention to the unfortunate issue that public relations further degenerates the public sphere through churnalism. He believes this is because “most people are more often sparsely informed” (Lewis, 2006: 305) on political and social affairs. Churnalism involves pre-packaged material provided by PR companies for journalists to use to create articles. News values have subsequently degraded and have adapted into a business style industry. This reflects the interests of the state, rather than the necessity for informing the public on politics and public affairs. This links to the issue with a misinformed public resulting in the inability to hold power to account. The authors of my found reading ‘The future of journalism’ support this perspective. They state that “fewer facts [are] checked” (Van der Haak, 2012: 2925) when receiving outside sources for stories. This is a result of the challenges that journalists face with the rise in digital platforms creating competition and pressure to produce content. They explain how journalism isn’t strictly news presenting as journalists need to remain innovative.

News has become a source of entertainment rather than information. Lewis implicitly divides the nation into a social class system of the professional audience in comparison to the working-class audience. Lewis suggests that for the working-class audience, news is replaced by crime, sports and celebrities, stating modern journalism has transformed into a commercial form. Commodification means that news is now produced to satisfy demand; thus, the audience has been transformed into a commodity. I believe this is a failure of modern journalism, however, I acknowledge that politics and public affairs are very rarely engaging to an audience outside of the exclusive circle.

Self-referential stories from outlets such as the Daily Mail infer the audience to be passive spectators. Lewis (2006: 309) makes the key point that public affairs have become a “class-specific discourse”. However, I understand that the ‘working-class’ audiences manage to receive political news through means of less serious news. This reflects the idea of media being agents of power, meaning it accords social power to certain individuals and has the influence to ruin reputations. Cassetteboy is a valid example of this style of news as it attracts the attention of people whom are disreputably difficult to reach through conventional means of technology. He manipulates videos of political speeches in a amusing way that the audience may find easier to comprehend. Although somewhat successful, this continues to misinform the public with subjective information.

Conclusively, Lewis makes a series of valid points on the transformation of journalism and conveys solutions to the issue of misinforming the public. Citizenship should be central to journalists’ focus, concentrating on useful information. I am still uncertain this would bring successful changes to the newsroom. I am interested in investigating the correlation between change of ‘professional’ news output and audience consumption to see if the media can be entirely blamed.

Bibliography:

Lewis, J. (2006) News and the empowerment of citizens. European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol 9, No 3, pp. 303-319

Castells, M., Van Der Haak, B., Parks, M. (2012) The future of journalism: Networked journalism. [pdf] United States: USC Annenberg Press. Available at: file:///Users/Yazzie/Downloads/1750-7407-1-PB.pdf

[Accessed 12 October 2017].