Closing the Journalism Parenthesis: The Trump Version

1 CLOSING THE JOURNALISM PARENTHESIS: NEWS MEDIATION IN A POST-GUTENBERG ENVIRONMENT THE TRUMP VERSION Tom Pettitt Cultural Sciences Institute and Centre for Medieval Literature University of Southern Denmark Amidst the horrors and absurdities of the 2016 American presidential election it took a reference by Nicky Woolf in the New Statesman (http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2016/11/us-election-2016-octobersurprise-wont-harm-hillary-clintons-chances) to remind me that my work on the “Gutenberg Parenthesis” could provide some insight into ongoing events. The link provided however was to a 2010 MIT presentation of the general thesis, rather than my more recent studies directly addressed to news and journalism. This article is the most relevant of them (and makes reference to the others). It was developed in 2013 and presented more informally to the Graduate Schools of Journalism at Columbia University and the City University of New York (for the original see https://www.academia.edu/4945533/Closing_the_Journalism_Parenthesis_News_Medi ation_in_a_Post-Gutenberg_Environment). It is reproduced here in a much streamlined version designed to enable more direct application of the Gutenberg Parenthesis idea (that our emergence from the print era is in many ways taking us back to conditions before print) . It has not been updated with references to specific instances from the 2016 campaign, but the concluding discussion of the original (which was about the future of journalism) has been replaced by thoughts about coping with a media environment in which untruths can be successfully peddled as news. I can be seen struggling my way towards an appreciation of this situation in a 2010 interview with Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab (at http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/the-gutenberg-parenthesisthomas-pettitt-on-parallels-between-the-pre-print-era-and-our-own-internet-age/). INTRODUCTORY REMARKS What follows is intended as a contribution to discussion of the Future of News, not least institutional news mediation in general and the profession of journalism in particular. It is offered by a contributor whose qualifications as a ‘FON-thinker’ have been acquired incidentally to the study of late-medieval culture, its early modern transformations and its survivals in Folklore, not least with regard to early and popular forms of news.1 Folklore and/as News I have for example studied songs, some of which were subsequently collected from singers in rural England and Scotland (and Appalachia and the Ozarks) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but which derived from printed originals composed by professional, ‘hack writers’ and published on single sheets by commercial printers, sold in thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies by street vendors in the cities and by 1 For some of the papers covered in the following, see my production at http://southerndenmark.academia.edu/ThomasPettitt, in the sections on ”Folk Songs and Ballads”, and ”Folk Tales and Legends”, respectively. 2 itinerant peddlers at country fairs and other gatherings. A substantial segment of such ‘broadside ballads’ were (or purported to be) news ballads. Like the tabloid newspapers which ultimately usurped this function at the end of the nineteenth century, they focused on sensational events with a strong personal interest, not least violent crimes (often with sexual aspects) and the trials and executions to which they led. Operating in the zone between the more serious newspapers and spoken rumor, such news ballads were for three centuries (ca 1600 – 1900) the dominant medium for the reporting of news to a popular semi-literate and illiterate audience. Meanwhile, in a quite distinct area of Folklore, I have explored aspects of what is undoubtedly the most vigorous and perhaps last surviving form of folk narrative in the western world, the ‘urban legend’ or ‘modern legend’. The preferred scholarly term is ‘contemporary legend’, as the events concerned are said to have occurred quite recently in relation to the moment of the relation. Modern contemporary legends – concerning people like us in a realistic setting facing situations offering an exquisite balance of the plausible and the extraordinary – are probably as close as a modern person can come to the pre-literate, pre-journalistic experience of receiving ‘news’. But while told as true in good faith by regular people, the particular news reported – a near escape from a maniac with a hook for a hand; a pet exploding in a microwave oven; a rat corpse in a pizza – is by definition untrue, and it is agreed by folklorists that the events (perhaps we should call them the ‘invents’) concerned effectively seduce or coerce those who have heard them into passing them on to others by virtue of evoking and reinforcing the unspoken fears and neuroses of the sub-communities in which they circulate. Indeed in pursuing this line of enquiry to a conclusion that will be invoked below, I have urged that the genre be re-dubbed ‘anxiety legends’. After the emergence of institutional news mediation, there has of course been a vigorous interaction between the two delivery systems, with contemporary legends originating, or being reported, in ‘the press’, but (predictably in the light of what is to come) the Internet has provided a particularly welcoming environment for the perpetration and propagation of such anxiety legends.2 Parenthetical Perspectives Any insights into pre- or sub-journalistic news production, mediation and reception that these studies may have achieved can have potential relevance for current and future developments in the light of Professor Lars Ole Sauerberg’s elegant and provocative suggestion that our culture more generally is in the process of emerging from a fourcenturies long period of print-domination which may usefully be characterized as the ‘Gutenberg Parenthesis’.3 Understood correctly (in what is still the predominant British English sense) as an intruded statement which for a while interrupts an already ongoing statement (as opposed to the punctuation marks signaling its opening and close – the Jan Fernback, ”Legends on the net: an examination of computer-mediated communication as a locus of oral culture”, New Media and Society. 5.1 (2003): 29-45. 3 For the current authoritative statement of Prof. Sauerberg and his colleagues on the meaning of the Gutenberg Parenthesis and its implications, see http://www.sdu.dk/en/Om_SDU/Institutter_centre/Ikv/Forskning/Forskningsprojekter/Gutenberg_p rojekt/PositionPaper. Several of my earlier presentations and publications are accessible at or via http://southerndenmark.academia.edu/ThomasPettitt/THE-GUTENBERG-PARENTHESIS. For a survey and some critical responses, see my “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition and Digital Technologies”, Lecture and Discussion in Comparative Media Studies Forum Series, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1 April 2010, http://web.mit.edu/commforum/forums/gutenberg_parenthesis.html. 2 3 more normal American usage),4 ‘parenthesis’ captures better than any rival metaphor the paradoxical duality of this historical trajectory. For while the initiation of the inserted statement cuts off the progress of the on-going, main statement, this latter is resumed when the parenthesis ends. The implication for scholarly investigation is that the respective media revolutions opening and closing the parenthesis can be usefully juxtaposed for their reciprocal enlightenment, not merely because they are of commensurate moment, but because the second revolution, in some significant ways, is reversing the first. So the conditions resulting from the closing of the parenthesis, despite the technological advances involved, will amount in many ways to a restoration of conditions obtaining prior to its opening. More specifically, knowledge of or insight into communication and cultural mediation before the Gutenberg Parenthesis may help to understand or predict the media environment (re-)emerging as it closes. This also encompasses the segment of cultural mediation known as news, together with the media technology (including its operatives, the journalists) by which it is achieved: for we may be living through the closing of a ‘Journalism Parenthesis’ too. THE GUTENBERG PARENTHESIS IN JOURNALISM STUDIES The Story So Far Emerging within Literary Studies, and although extended by the present writer to folk traditions and popular mass media, the Gutenberg Parenthesis concept has not as yet been systematically extended to news mediation and journalism. An interview for Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab in 2010 5 has received considerable internet attention, but the statements were off the cuff: luckily Megan Garber selected for uploading one of the more coherent passages, and accompanied it with a clear and concise summary of what she reckoned I was trying to say. Better prepared for was the interview with myself and Prof. Sauerberg conducted by Dean Starkman, and subsequently published in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2013: It did not focus specifically on news and journalism until towards the end, however.6 Meanwhile, in the period since the concept of a Gutenberg Parenthesis started to achieve international attention in 2007, a few scholars from within Journalism Studies and/or practicing journalists have drawn attention to its potential implications. In addition to Dean Starkman (who may have thought at an early stage that we were actually welcoming the developments described or predicted),7 the Gutenberg Parenthesis has been repeatedly and legitimately invoked, in the context of his own agenda for the future of journalism, by Jeff Jarvis, whose discussions have done much to 4 i.e., thus far, in the sense relevant here, this sentence has deployed two parentheses, not four. Wikipedia suggests that this can usefully be specified as the ‘rhetorical’ sense of the term. 5 Megan Garber, “The Gutenerg Parenthesis: Thomas Pettitt on parallels between the pre-print era and our own Internet age”, Nieman Journalism Lab, http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/the-gutenbergparenthesis-thomas-pettitt-on-parallels-between-the-pre-print-era-and-our-own-internet-age/. 6 “The future is medieval. A discussion with the scholars behind the ‘Gutenberg Parenthesis’, a sweeping theory of digital – and journalism – transformation”. Interview by Dean Starkman, “The Business Audit”, Columbia Journalism Review, 7 June 2013. http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_future_is_medieval.php?page=all 7 Dean Starkman, “Confidence Game. The limited vision of the new gurus”, Columbia Journalism Review (Nov/Dec. 2011), http://www.cjr.org/essay/confidence_game.php?page=all 4 bring it to wider public attention.8 In one of the earliest responses, Clyde Bentley, of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri, found it an “unnerving but plausible theory”,9 and Katharine Viner, at that time Deputy Editor at The Guardian and Editor in Chief of the all-digital Guardian Australia (now Editor in Chief at the Guardian) invoked it to open an eloquent and widely appreciated survey and analysis of “The Rise of the Reader: Journalism in the Age of the Open Web”, delivered on 9 October as the 2013 Arthur Norman Smith Lecture in Journalism at University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism.10 Seeing the Future of News in the Past It is widely agreed that journalism in general and newspaper journalism in particular are facing a crisis of considerable dimensions, and Ross Dawson has prepared and published a frightening “... Newspaper Extinction Timeline for every country in the world”,11 which suggests that the newspaper as we know it will have disappeared in the USA by 2017, in Denmark by 2023, and in Argentina by 2039, after which it seems anyone intending to make or continue a career in this sort of journalism will need to learn Mongolian. Other commentary speaks of journalism confronting an “existential crisis”; “turmoil”; “massive upheaval”; a “chaotic moment” or just “trouble”, which will involve “contraction”, “shrinking” and “decline”, leading ultimately to the “twilight”, “vanishing”, and “demise” of journalism, or indeed a journalistic “apocalypse”. Such are the “crisis tropes” identified by Pablo J. Boczkowski, Director of the Media, Technology and Society Program at Northwestern University, in a 2012 research survey (with Ignacio Siles), “Making sense of the newspaper crisis: A critical assessment of existing research and an agenda for future work”.12 Of interest for present purposes is its more constructive part, the “agenda for future work”, which includes “situating current developments within a historical perspective …”, as “The present-centric orientation espoused by accounts of the newspaper crisis … runs the risk of overlooking the historical antecedents that might have shaped the current crisis in significant ways.” This is encouraging, except that it transpires the “influence of the past in the present”, whose exploration will “reverse the present- and future-centric perspectives of most accounts of the newspaper crisis” is taken to reside in the analog technologies. ‘History’ means the 1950’s, in accordance with the norm in Media Studies generally of perceiving radio and television, records and film as the ‘Old Media’ with which our digital ‘New Media’ can be compared and contrasted. Applying the Gutenberg Parenthesis idea to the Future of News deploys instead what may be termed the ‘Deep History’ of media technologies, not merely beyond digital to analog, but For example “New Molecules”, http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/10/11/new-molecules/; “Who says our way is the right way?” http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/11/21/who-says-our-way-is-the-rightway/, also reproduced at Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-jarvis/who-says-ourway-is-the-r_b_786534.html See also “Digital first: what it means for journalism”, The Guardian, 26 June 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/26/digital-first-what-means-journalism?INTCMP=SRCH. Jeff Jarvis, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way we Work and Live (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) pp. 91-2. 9 Clyde Bentley, “Parenthetically Speaking”, rji, 26 July 2010, http://www.rjionline.org/parentheticallyspeaking. 10 The Guardian. 9 Oct., 2013: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/09/the-rise-ofthe-reader-katharine-viner-an-smith-lecture 11 http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2010/10/launch_of_newsp.html 12 New Media Society 14.8 (2012): 1375-1394. 8 5 beyond analog to print; beyond print to the alphabet and writing; beyond the alphabet and writing to media pre-history, the technological zero option of the human voice and memory. And paradoxically the further we go back, the further we are seeing into the Future of News, for the journalism era was not merely an ‘era’ or a ‘phase’, as correctly perceived by Jay Rosen,13 it was a parenthesis, and if it is ending we are in some ways picking up where we left off. INTRODUCING THE GUTENBERG PARENTHESIS Discerning a parenthetical trajectory in deep media history involves a series of assertions, each of which requires some introduction and commentary to avoid confusion and to head off objection. The Model Communication Technologies Firstly, and obviously, it is asserted that media history in a given society can usefully be periodized by the arrival of new communication technologies. But while schematic presentations may imply that a new, higher technology displaces an earlier, lower one, the reality is clearly that the newcomer more often displaces an earlier medium from primacy in some, significant, functions, and altogether provokes adjustment into a new configuration in what has always (from the moment speech supplemented gesticulation) been a poly-media environment. Cumulative Culminations Secondly, some of such reconfigurations qualify as revolutions, but these are invariably cumulative, resulting from the quantitative and qualitative affordances of the new technology itself, plus their interaction with those already in place. The ‘print’ revolution is therefore so qualified not only on the basis of what was new and special about print, but also by the way it enabled the as yet unfulfilled potential of the alphabet, the codex (aka ‘book’) and paper, all of which had been in use for centuries or millennia. The ‘Internet’ revolution will correspondingly comprise the cumulative effect of the Internet itself, and the way it fulfills the potential of digital technology and earlier electronic media. And while such complex reconfigurations take time to work themselves out, it is nonetheless possible to identify moments of culmination (watersheds; lock in points; points of no return) when it is retrospectively evident (and smetimes acknowledged by contemporaries) that decisive change has occurred, be it in quantitative terms (the extent to which a new delivery system is adopted) and/or qualitative (the significance of the cultural systems into which that adoption has penetrated). The Print Revolution might be said to have reached such a cumulative culmination when the number of copies of printed books overtook (ca 1500?) or tripled (ca 1600?) the number of manuscript codices copied during the preceding millennium, or when print erupted into significant cultural systems such as pastime and entertainment (printed narratives; songbooks; play scripts), or of course news mediation (those printed news ballads discussed above), both pointing to the early seventeenth century. In the case of the Internet Revolution, the cumulative culmination under many headings can be 13 “The Journalists Formerly known as the Media: My Advice to the Next Generation”, Press Think, 19 Sept,m 2010, http://pressthink.org/2010/09/the-journalists-formerly-known-as-the-media-my-advice-tothe-next-generation/. 6 roughly located around 2000 (symbolized by the panic about the ‘millennium bug’ – the first internet urban legend?), and the same might be said for news mediation, as signaled perhaps by threshold events such as the founding of the Drudge Report in 1996 and of Huffington Post in 2005. The Restoration Topos These two are preconditions for the third and definitive assertion, that a later revolution, despite the technological advance which qualifies it as a revolution, is nonetheless in significant ways restoring conditions prior to some earlier revolution of commensurate proportions. And while counter-intuitive, assertions of this kind have now become so commonplace as to qualify for the status of a topos in the study of media history – that is, a concept which many have found useful and enlightening, particularly if formulated with a striking and appropriate metaphor (in which case it also qualifies as a trope): like Agent of Change; Gutenberg Galaxy; Cyberspace; Information Highway; Meme. I have suggested that this one be designated the ‘Restoration Topos’,14 to emphasize that it does not involve an actual reversion to earlier conditions, but a resumption which nonetheless reflects what has occurred in the meantime. But among the recent or current versions of the Restoration Topos applied to media history there is considerable variation in the technologies suggested for the respective roles of interrupting and restoring revolutions, and in the nature of what, exactly, is restored. With regard specifically to news and journalism, a clear favorite has emerged in the last few years in thesis that the expanding ‘social media’ of blogs and even more recently Facebook and Twitter (and the others that are emerging as this is being written and re-written) are restoring the “unfiltered, multi-directional exchange of information” characteristic of earlier times. The words quoted, appropriately, are those of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, in a 2010 interview cited in Katharine Viner’s lecture mentioned earlier. More specifically, he is juxtaposing Twitter with news mediation in Ancient Greece, where “the way that news and information was passed around” was through meeting others in the market-place or agora. Other suggestions for the conditions the Internet’s social media are restoring (also with a certain focus on news mediation) are surveyed by Matthew Ingram in a blog entry entitled, “Back to the future: What if the ‘mass media’ era was just an accident of history?”15 It cites the work of Lee Humphries (Communication Studies, Cornell University) on early-modern personal letters and diaries (the latter actually designed to be read by visiting friends),16 which prompts Ingram to remark: if you look at human communication over a longer period than just the past generation or two, it becomes obvious that one-way, broadcast-style ‘mass media’ isn’t the norm at all — instead, the norm is interpersonal or multi-directional communication that shares a lot more with social media such as blogs, Twitter and Thomas Pettitt, Media Dynamics and the Lessons of History: The ‘Gutenberg Parenthesis’ as Restoration Topos”, in The Blackwell Companion to New Media Dynamics, ed. Jean Burgess, John Hartley and Axel Bruns (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 53-72. 15 Matthew Ingram, “Back to the future: What if the ‘mass media’ era was just an accident of history?” (11 May 2013), http://paidcontent.org/2013/05/11/back-to-the-future-what-if-the-mass-media-era-was-just-an-accidentof-history/ 16 Ingram supplies a link to a Nieman Journalism Lab report: http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/05/diaries-the-original-social-media-how-our-obsession-withdocumenting-and-sharing-our-own-lives-is-nothing-new/ 14 7 Facebook. Rather than creating a new communication style, we are actually returning to one. (emphasis supplied) The intervening period, in Humphries’ terms, was “a blip, a historical aberration”. Ingram also reports more extensively on the broader coverage of Tom Standage, digital editor of The Economist , in a number of contributions, subsequently culminating with the publication of his book, Writing on the Wall: Social Media, the First 2,000 Years. In Standage’s perception of media history the norm for the communication of information and ideas has always been ‘social media’, in the form of conversation, letters and other writings and indeed earlier forms of print publication, of which our digital, internet platforms are a natural continuation. Except that this continuity was briefly interrupted by an interlude dominated by the mass media, both printed and broadcast, so now, as their time draws to a close, we are “coming full circle”.17 Or as he subsequently says, the period of mass media dominance “was a historical anomaly. … Indeed, it might better be termed the ‘mass-media parenthesis’”.18 The sections in the book dealing with this and the periods immediately on either side of it include considerable focus on news mediation, and indeed Standage dates the opening of this ‘mass media parenthesis’ very precisely to 1833, which saw the foundation of the New York Sun, the first one-cent newspaper. It was based on the now familiar business model of offering ‘popular’ types of news which (at its low price) ensured a wide circulation, and so attracted advertising revenue. The technological advance enabling this revolution was the introduction of steam-driven, iron presses to replace the wooden, manually operated presses which had been the norm since Gutenberg. Under academic auspices a similar scenario has been developed by historian Andrew Pettegree in his The Invention of News, which suggests by way of conclusion that from our current perspective the intervening “age of the newspaper seems comparatively fleeting” and that the “evolving and unstable multimedia world that characterises the early twenty-first century” may have more in common with the earlier period covered by his survey.19 Our Gutenberg Parenthesis, as the name suggests, belongs rather to a cluster of transformations of the Restoration Topos which associate the interrupting revolution with the earlier introduction and diffusion of print technology itself at the transition from the late-medieval to the modern periods. As I suggest in a more sustained comparison,20 while the contrast between the new cheap, masscirculation newspapers of the early nineteenth century and their established, more staid and expensive counterparts was considerable, this was less the case in relation to the single-sheet news broadsides (with prose accounts, news ballads, or both) which had been Tom Standage, ”The End of Mass Media: Coming Full Circle”, The Economist, 7 July, 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/18904158. Robert Darnton has made the same juxtaposition of past and present in relation to blogging in “Blogging, Now and Then”, New York Review of Books. 18 March 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/mar/18/blogging-now-and-then/ 18 Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall: Social Media, the First 2,000 Years (London, etc.: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), p. 241, heralded on Standage’s website in “My next book: ‘Writing on the Wall’”, http://tomstandage.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/my-next-book-writing-on-the-wall/. 19 Andrew Pettegree,The Invention of News. How the World Came to Know About Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 371-2; see also his elaboration in “Digital Futures: The Lessons from History”, Huffington Post, 25 March 2014: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-pettegree/digitalfutures-the-lesso_b_5023296.html . 20 “The Parenthetical Turn in Journalism Studies: The Role of the News Ballads”, https://www.academia.edu/11615800/The_Parenthetical_Turn_in_Journalism_Studies_The_Role_of_the _News_Ballads. 17 8 a significant feature of the media market since about 1600 (and whose sensationalizing function the penny press took over), suggesting 1833 was a less abrupt transition than 1600. THE FUTURE OF NEWS MEDIATION & JOURNALISM News as Category; News-Mediating Institutions Within the Gutenberg Parenthesis the most striking and fundamental development for this discussion was the emergence of ‘news’ itself as a particular category of information about events and situations at a distance (so of which the news-recipient was not a direct observer). In the history of our culture all such information has always been of two basic kinds, distinguished not by their veracity but by the source of their delivery: there is official news, promulgated by the state (as proclamations) or by the church (from the pulpit), and there is popular news, delivered by word of mouth, or sometimes as letters, among and between private individuals. The latter could be true, based on actual events, or untrue, based on what I have already suggested be termed ‘invents’, but before the Gutenberg Parenthesis these were at the moment of reception effectively indistinguishable, so ‘news’ and ‘rumor’ were not distinct categories: ‘news’ referred to the content of such information, ‘rumor’ to the medium, i.e. the sound of the voice. The Gutenberg Parenthesis saw a shift in this configuration with what might be termed the birth of news in the modern sense, the construction (perhaps rather the achievement) of a category of non-official information which was nonetheless accorded almost the same credence and authority as the official (and could even question the veracity of information promulgated by officialdom). This now became ‘News’ (with a capital N), accepted as based on events, leaving ‘rumor’ to drift in the direction of unauthenticated and likely implausible assertion, ultimately invention (derivation from invents). This was very much a symptom of changes related to the print medium, not least the institutionalization of news gathering and news dissemination in the form of dedicated, invariably commercial, organizations – what became known as the ‘news media’. As just noted this development is sometimes assigned to the nineteenth-century, with the industrialization of printing and the commercialization of news mediation, but the change was underway in the early seventeenth century if not earlier, for example in the form of the printer-publishers of those news ballads. And at least the image of a commercial, news-mediating institution was in place by the time of Ben Jonson’s comedy, The Staple of News, of 1622. The result of obsessive observation and analysis, Jonson’s comic satires are perceptive reflections of and on the London scene, and while his emporium where news items could be purchased by paying customers is clearly fictional, it recognizes an inherent potential in the London media scene. As it happens, Jonson’s fictional Staple sold news in the form of written manuscripts, but he is aware of the potential of print, inserting an insightful dialogue between the owner and a customer on the role of print in news, the latter averring, of items of information, that “Unto some, / The very printing of them makes them news”, and such people “… have not the heart to believe anything / But what they see in print” (1.5.51-55).21 The attitude is anticipated a decade or more earlier in the scene in 21 Ben Jonson, The Staple of News, ed. Devra Rowland Kifer, Regents Renaissance Drama (London: Arnold, 1976). 9 Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale where a group of young country people are examining the wares of a peddler cum ballad-hawker with a view to purchase: “I love a ballad in print … for then we are sure they are true” (4.4.258-9).22 Such views clearly reflect the authority conferred by the affordances of print as a medium (precisely as surveyed, at a much higher cultural plane, by Elizabeth Eisenstein): the production of multiple copies with identical texts which are impervious to interference between production and delivery (and remain unchanged thereafter). The sense of authority was enhanced by the institutionalization inherent in the capital investment required by printing technology (as Gutenberg himself discovered) leading to the formation of substantial commercial organizations, enhanced in the case of news by the need for professional news-gatherers (journalists) and news-assessors (editors; ‘gatekeepers’) to distinguish their product from what the director of Jonson’s Staple calls “barbers’ news”, “tailors’ news” and “porters’ and watermens’ news” (1.5.9-10; we would presumably now say “cab-drivers’ news”). With the closing of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, however, such news mediating institutions, and with them ‘fortress journalism’,23 are now threatened by competition from amateur, or at least non-institutional, digital news mediation which can at little expense achieve the authoritative impression (pun intended) of print, but without its authority and integrity, as digital texts are emphatically subject to change and interference.24 So if the opening of the Gutenberg Parenthesis saw the emergence of news as a new category of information, the closing of the Gutenberg Parenthesis involves a reversal, a de-categorization within non-official news, so that ‘news’ and ‘rumor’ again become effectively interchangeable.25 Katharine Viner is optimistic that the postparenthetical restoration will be better than a reversion: First, there was a whole heap of conversation but no clear version of the truth. Then, there was a very clear version of the truth, but no space for conversation. Now, what we have is the truth made better by conversation.26 But the difference between post- and pre-parenthetical conditions may also be greater confusion, as our current de-categorization of information also seems to encompass the demarcation between news and advertising, witness the emergence of hybrids such as ‘native advertising’, as also between news and entertainment (witness the entertaining rumor about the Fox News broadcast license). The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel, Oxford Shakespeare/World’s Classics (Oxford: OUP, 1996). Peter Horrocks, “The End of Fortress Journalism”, The Future of Journalism. Papers from a Conference organized by the BBC College of Journalism, ed.Charles Miller (London: CoJo Publications, 2009), pp. 617, << http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/future_of_journalism.pdf; c.f. also Steven A. Smith, “Fortress Journalism Failed. The Transparent Newsroom Works”, Pressthink, http://archive.pressthink.org/2005/11/23/spk_ss.html 22 23 For a very systematic account of the role of blogs in news mediation, see Melissa Wall, “'Blogs of war' : Weblogs as news”, Journalism, 6 (2005): 153-172. 25 This de-categorization is associated with the decline of ‘gatekeeping’ in journalism by Jayson Harsin, “The Rumor Bomb: On Convergence Culture and Politics”, Flow . 11 December 2008, http://flowtv.org/2008/12/the-rumor-bomb-on-convergence-culture-and-politics-jayson-harsinamerican-university-of-paris/. Their earlier separation (the emergence of categories) is traced by F.J. Levy, “Staging the News”, Print, Manuscript and Performance. ed. Arthur F. Marotti & Michael D. Bristol (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), pp. 252-278. 26 “The Rise of the Reader …”. 24 10 So how are post-parenthetical readers and viewers to distinguish news from invention (aka rumor), advertising and entertainment? Well, how did pre-parenthetical society cope with the uncertainties involved? The most general answer is that categorizing information as true and false is itself a feature of the Gutenberg (Journalism) Parenthesis, and that pre-print people were brought up in a culture which for centuries had operated, as we may again soon, in a media environment where most news was somewhere on the spectrum between true and false (and more or less entertaining). The likelihood was that there was at least a grain of truth (of some kind) and an element of invention in almost every piece of news.27 Most news reports have some kind of ‘spin’, and exchanging rumor and gossip plays a role in the developing relations between teller and listener, as well as communicating information. Pre-modern criteria for assessing the relative proportions will require further research, but on the basis of the tale of the “Boy who cried wolf”, one criterion will almost certainly have been the track-record of the immediate informant.28 The Form of News In reality, most news is ongoing, in the sense that it consists of a chain of linked increments, each of which is ‘breaking’ as it becomes known. In the period before both the Gutenberg and the Journalism Parentheses, these increments will have been reported serially, arriving at a given location in the same order as a concatenated series (my diagram below is optimistic about their regularity). The effect is strikingly reproduced by Shakespeare towards the end of Macbeth and Richard III when the fall of both tyrants is presaged by the arrival of a series of messenger each bearing more recent news of the assembly, strength and approach of the opposing forces. The classic journalistic news mediation within the Parenthesis subjects this sequential pattern to massive conglomeration, re-ordering and containment. Thanks to the practical affordances of print as a medium (including the need to transport it across space), newspapers tended to be issued once every 24 hours, that is, in diurnal packages. This requires people in the employ of the medium, diurnalists, to take whatever increments are available at the deadline. But rather than reproducing the reports verbatim and in the order received, dyurnalists write (wrap) them up into a news ‘story’ in the classic ‘inverted pyramid’ structure, with lead, body and tail, dismantling the chronological sequence. The journalists do the same at the next diurnal deadline only now with a pyramid shaping the increments received since last time, together with enough about the earlier increments to provide the narrative context. And so on for the next day. With the arrival of the analogue media, and its typically hourly news broadcasts, many journalists technically became horalists, that is performing the above wrapping up 27 For an anguished, in-depth analysis of the interlacing of truth and untruth in rumor and institutional news by one of this generation’s leading folklorists, see Carl Lindahl’s “Legends of Hurricane Katrina: The Right to Be Wrong, Survivor Storytelling, and Healing”, Journal of American Folklore, 125.496 (2012): 139-176; A redacted version of the introductory section setting the scene and reviewing approaches, “Some Legendary Takes on Hurricane Katrina”, is available in American Folklore Society Review: Essays (March 07 2012), at http://www.afsnet.org/news/84668/Some-Legendary-Takes-on-Hurricane-Katrina.htm. 28 For a systematic survey of responses to the truthfulness or otherwise of rumors which will requite closer study see Gary Alan Fine, “Rumor, Trust and Civil Society: Collective Memory and Cultures of Judgment”, Diogenes, 54.1 (2007): 5-18, and for a range of specific explorations the essays collected in G. A. Fine, C. Heath, & V. Campion-Vincent, eds., Rumor mills: The social impact of rumor and legend (Chicago: Aldine, 2005); there is an acute concluding discussion covering “Seven Questions” in rumor and (contemporary) legend research, including “What Does Truth Have to Do with It?” and “What Does Belief Have to Do with it?” 11 exercise on an hourly, rather than a daily basis. Internet news, institutional or otherwise, is now effectively the business of momentalists, responding to information on an ongoing news story as it breaks, aided by the fluidity (amenability to adjustment) of digital texts. Thus far three major techniques have emerged, the first two merely adaptations of the parenthetical, diurnal wrap-up: as and when the aggregate of new increments of news warrants it, a new news story can be written; or the old article can be updated to encompass the new increments (‘corrections’ duly noted at end). But the third response takes us beyond (and to before) the Gutenberg Parenthesis by adding each new increment (with little editorial intervention or commentary) as it comes in, typically at the top of the pile of existing increments. News reception once again becomes, as in the Greek or medieval market-place, a concatenated sequence of increments in chronological order (which newcomers read in reverse-chronological sequence). Currently, even in internet news mediation, the rounded article form remains the default mode, with the concatenation of news increments reserved for special circumstances. But all news actually comprises concatenated sequences (which can subsequently be extended with meta-news of how the news was handled by other mediators), and is therefore amenable to this treatment. I accordingly agree with Jeff Jarvis that this will soon be the new default,29 with rounded articles as optional auxiliaries (a task which computers are threatening to usurp anyway30). News Mediation We may, finally take a closer look at the processes of news mediation, that is, the avenues by which news of events (and some invents) comes to the attention of people who were not there, and where we can expected the same overall parenthetical scenario to be discernible. Before print, news/rumor was ‘trans-mitted’ (handed on) in a series of face-to face (mouth to ear) stages, sometimes bifurcating into a network as one transmitter passes it on to several others. The common idiom of hearing something ‘on the grapevine’ captures effectively this process and its characteristics. “What news?” was the standard greeting on meeting strangers from other parts or neighbors returning from visits or travels elsewhere . Such news-transmitting encounters occurred on the road (most people walked), at inns, and at places of customary assembly like wells or the barber-shop. A whole network of contacts was provided by bakers: their servants delivered bread to households in a cluster of communities (and paused for gossip at the doorstep), while local customers brought their own loaves and pies etc. to be cooked in the baker’s oven, exchanging rumor and gossip as they waited for their turn. We are extraordinarily well“The article as luxury or by-product”, http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/05/28/the-article-asluxury-or-byproduct/; “The orthoxy of the article part II”, http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/06/12/the-orthodoxy-of-the-article-part-ii/; “The article and the future of print”, http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/06/18/the-article-and-the-future-of-print/; “The storyteller strikes back”, http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/06/17/the-storyteller-strikes-back/. See also the earlier comments of Kevin Marsh, whose perception of the relationship between the deadline and the rounded article anticipate (and probably influenced mine): “The Death of the Story”, in The Future of Journalism. Papers from a Conference organized by the BBC College of Journalism , ed.Charles Miller (London: CoJo Publications, 2009), pp. 70-88, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/future_of_journalism.pdf 30 Joe Fassler, “Can the Computers at Narrative Science Replace Paid Writers?” The Atlantic (12 April 2012), http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/04/can-the-computers-at-narrative-sciencereplace-paid-writers/255631/ 29 12 informed about such grapevines in the early modern period, as when the authorities got wind of a dangerous rumor, they set about tracing its transmission with the ardor of a modern folklorist, but advantaged by coercive techniques to which the latter does not have access. For example in 1633 a Scotsman staying at the Angel Inn in Stilton, Huntingdonshire, told the ostler there that Scottish Catholics were on the brink of staging a major rebellion. The ostler told it to other travelers at the inn, including a Robert Johnson, who on returning to his own town told it to his brother in law Richard Sawyer, who told it to his son, Henry Sawyer, from yet another town. There he subsequently told it to travelers passing by the field in which he was working, including Christopher Coursey, who when he reached his home town told it to his neighbour, John Cooke, who told it to other neighbours, one of whom told it to a visiting friend from another town, who when he got back told the parson, who told the mayor, who told the magistrates who instigated the investigation that revealed the above sequence of links.31 31 Adam Fox, “Rumor, News and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England”, Historical Journal. 40.3 (1997): 597-620, the specific instance cited from pp. 607-8. For further discussion and evidence see Ethan H. Shagan, “Rumors and Popular Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII”, in The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500 – 1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 30-59; Roger B. Manning, “Violence and Social Conflict in Mid-Tudor Rebellions”, Journal of British Studies 16 (1976-77): 18-40, e.g. p. 19 for efforts of magistrates to track down sources of dangerous rumors. 13 While each link in this chain has the same status and function as the others, what has been called the ‘stand alone journalism’ of the Gutenberg Parenthesis involves rather demarcating participants into distinct categories with regard to news mediation, not least the reporters who, together with the news outlet they serve, stand between the sources of (more direct) information on a given event, and the readers to whom it is delivered. Among its many effects, digital, Internet technology is dismantling these distinctions, with the information provided by the sources directly accessible to erstwhile readers, “the people formerly known as the audience”, in Jay Rosen’s startling formulation,32 many of whom become hybrid reporter-readers – ‘repeaters’ – who pass the material on to others, while the reporter risks being by-passed. Translated into contemporary terms, the news organization risks being reduced to one node among many in a network system of news mediation, and indeed ‘network (or ‘networked’) journalism’ is widely agreed to be where news mediation is headed.33 In quest of survival strategies: Journalism This being the case, it is pertinent to ask whether studies of pre- or sub-journalistic communication through rumor and gossip can offer any hints on a survival strategy for institutional news mediation (and its journalists) in this new, networked media environment.34 Fieldwork studies in the transmission of rumor35 have discerned that upon entering a communications network (a large group of people in regular contact) a given rumor Jay Rosen, “The People Formerly Known as the Audience”, PRESSthink, 27 June 2006, http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html. 33 What looks set fair to become the standard work is Ansgard Heinrich’s Network Journalism (New York: Routledge, 2010), although in speaking persistently of a “journalism sphere” there is a residual containment aspect, more appropriate to the Gutenberg Parenthesis, in its perceptions. 34 For a succinct survey of rumor research with persistent juxtaposition with news, see Pamela Donovan, “How Idle is Idle Talk? One Hundred Years of Rumor Research”, Diogenes 54.1 (2007): 59-82. 35 Linda Degh & Andrew Vázsong, "Legend and Belief", Genre. 4.3 (Sept., 1971): 281-304; repr. Folklore Genres, ed. Dan Ben-Amos (Austin & London: Univ. Texas Press, 1976), pp. 93-123, and "The Hypothesis of Multi-Conduit Transmission in Folklore", Folklore. Performance and Communication, ed. Dan Ben-Amos & Kenneth S. Goldstein (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 207-52. For a survey and discussion see Trevor J. Blank, “Conduit Theory”, in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales & Fairy tales, ed. Donald Haase (Westport, CT, 2008), pp. 231-2. 32 14 does not percolate evenly through it (like liquid spilt on a cloth), but follows a route of least resistance (like rainwater over an uneven surface), called a ‘conduit’. It is composed of people (nodes) who are disposed to listen to, remember, and pass on this particular type of information. Transmision, in other words, is dependent on receptivity, and this ‘Conduit Theory’ points to what might be termed a passive survival strategy in which a news institution places itself athwart one or more of such conduits by gathering and diffusing news/rumor of kinds which large numbers of the people constituting nodes in a network would be most interested to hear. The most obvious conduits, exploited by a number of magazines, are those of feelgood rumors, which make the world seem brighter, either by promising good fortune or offering vicarious experience of it by reporting the lives of celebrities. A more powerful option is suggested in my own studies in contemporary legends suggesting that most avid attention (and credence) is accorded to information which feeds on and feeds into deep, if not always fully formulated, anxieties (not least about potential threats to well-being). A combination of these Conduit and Anxiety Theories suggests that exploiting the paranoias and other neuroses of a substantial segment of the community would be a promising option for survival and a good business model: but of course there is at least one American news company that doesn’t need to be told this. However as a long-term strategy it is doomed or will need radical redirection: within a generation (as the full version of this paper explains), those conduits will follow the altogether different anxieties, attendant on the cognitive impact of a new mediation technology, of digital natives. For those in quest of a more honorable, proactive strategy, there is encouragement in the fact that disciplines as distant as Network Theory and Folklore (which might be defined as the study of cultural transmission through networks) point to the vital importance in this connection of the hub, also known as the super-node or Connector. While there are some networks in which all nodes have a comparable number of links, in most, both naturally occurring (e.g. human cells) and man-made (e.g. the internet and global air travel systems) a few nodes have connections which are orders of magnitude greater than those of the remainder: such hubs “are a fundamental property of most networks”.36 The first aim for an institutional news mediator in a network news system (not to be confused with the ‘news networks’), evidently, is to become a hub (a newsmongering equivalent of an O’Hare or a Heathrow) – the second of course being the development of a business strategy for making a living out of this function. Such hubs have also been discerned in the dissemination of rumor and gossip, qualified for this role independently of rumor content and on the basis of some recognized, intrinsic authority: people you go to in quest of unofficial news, and to whom you want to tell your own. It may be encouraging in a paradoxical sort of way that they have been identified particularly among employees of large businesses, by whose directors they are perceived as a threat. And interestingly the researchers, Foster and Rostow, who established their existence, labeled them ‘gatekeepers’,37 a term with considerable resonance in Journalism Studies. As originally formulated (during the Second World War), the notion of gatekeeping was related to a junction in the distribution of food products at which decisions were made as to whether items would proceed, and if so down which channel. Interestingly, 36 Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science and Everyday Life (New York: Plume, 2003, p. 56. E. K. Foster & R. L. Rosnow, “Gossip and network relationships”, in D. C. Kirkpatrick, S. W. Duck , & M. K. Foley, eds. Relating Difficulty. The Processes of Constructing and Managing Difficult Interaction ( Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006), pp. 161-180. 37 15 the originator of the concept, Kurt Lewin, was aware of a potential application to news, but seems to have been thinking more of rumor than of journalism: “the travelling of a news item through certain communication channels in a group”.38 Before long though it was applied to journalism, but more in terms of doorkeeper, like St Peter at the Pearly Gates: is this item admitted with rejoicing into the newsroom/newshole or is it (like sinners in hell-frescoes) spiked?39 Studies of post-print journalism therefore speculate on the role of gatekeepers “when the fences have blown away”, or “while the rest of the wall crumbles away”.40 But attempts to reformulate the designation or function of the gatekeeper -- ‘gatewatching’ (Axel Bruns); gate-opener (Luigi Manca); poking the gate, mocking the gate (Haiqing Yu) 41 – will be useful insofar as they avoid any residual sense of that gate as the entrance or exit of an enclosure (determining whether a piece of information would be ‘in the news’). We should not so much adopt new attitudes to the yard-gate as discover the original sense of gatekeeping as manning a road-block. This in turn will be compatible with the role of the rumor gatekeeper in deciding whether to pass a given rumor further into the network via his many connections. The gatekeepers identified by rumor-researchers Ralph Rosnow and Erik Foster “tend to position themselves along unique social bridges between other network members".42 Trouble in Times Square, 2013 In order to gauge the current state of play in this transition to network journalism, and the changing role of institutional news mediation, I undertook the very limited case study of following the diffusion of a particular news item in the hours immediately following the event concerned. This was an incident near Times Square, New York, late on the evening, local time, of 14 September, 2013, in which police officers sought to control a man behaving erratically in the traffic. At one point he was thought to be taking out a weapon, and two officers fired at him; they missed, but the bullets hit two bystanders, one of whom, a disabled woman with a walker, was wounded in the leg and fell to the ground. The study concerned not the truth of the event, or attitudes to it, but its pathways into public knowledge. In their coverage, the news websites of the New York Times and other NYC news institutions in part followed conventional (Journalism Parenthesis) procedures, sending reporters to interview witnesses (accompanied by a photographer to take pictures of the Kurt Lewin, “Frontiers in Group Dynamics: II. Channels of Group Life; Social Planning and Action Research”, Human Relations. 1.2 (1947): 143-153, at p. 145, http://hum.sagepub.com/content/1/2/143.full.pdf+html 39 Standard works on gatekeeping theory and its application to journalism are Pamela Shoemaker, Gatekeeping, Communication Concepts, 3 (London: Sage Pubications, 1991), and Pamela J. Shoemaker & Timothy Vos Gatekeeping Theory (London: Routledge, 2009). 40 Steve Buttry, “Gatekeepers need to find new value when the fences have blown away”. The Buttry Diary. 30 April 2012, http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/gatekeepers-need-tofind-new-value-when-the-fences-have-blown-away/; Kendyl Salcito, ”Gatekeeping”, Journalism Ethics for the Global Citizen, ONLINE JOURNALISM ETHICS, Center for Journalism Ethics, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009, http://www.journalismethics.info/online_journalism_ethics/gatekeeping.htm 41 Axel Bruns, Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (New York: Peter Lang, 2005); Luigi Manca, “Journalists: Gatekeepers or Gate-openers? A Reinterpretation of the Westley-MacLean Model Based on MacLean's Unpublished Papers”, Draft of September 15, 1999, http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~pieper/manca-paper.html; Haiqing Yu, “Beyond gatekeeping: J-blogging in China”. Journalism. 12.4 (2011): 379-393. 42 Ralph L. Rosnow & Erik K. Foster, “Rumor and Gossip Research”, Psychological Science Agenda. 19.3 (April 2005), http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2005/04/gossip.aspx 38 16 scene in the aftermath), to attend the Police Department press conference, to receive a statement by a hospital spokesman, and to interview an expert in police training methods; someone also consulted police guidelines for the use of firearms in a public place. But they also deployed the resources of the new (news) media, particularly Twitter and YouTube. One bystander in particular, who unlike the NYT photographer was at the scene and close to the action as the event unrolled, posted a series of tweets, some accompanied by pictures, including a striking snapshot of the injured woman lying on the ground still hanging on to her walker.43 Other bystanders recorded the event on smartphones, and posted the videos on YouTube. This material confirms the potential threat of the internet and its social media to institutional news mediation, for the bloggers and citizen journalists have as direct and immediate access as the professionals to those tweets and videos (and there must have been more, as the videos indicate clearly that many other bystanders were recording the events). But surprisingly, in the immediate aftermath, and on the basis of a small but arbitrary (Google-based) sample, this did not happen. The bloggers went to the institutional news outlets, and later bloggers copied or linked to the earlier: they did not seem to be systematically accessing the internet sources directly, but assumed a parasitical relationship to conventional news providers. Some must surely have done so, but the overall indication is that the websites of the conventional press are, emphatically, news hubs. It remains to be explored and pondered whether this reflects a quality of bloggers (say some disinclination to conduct independent research – or even an independent search) or a quality of the news institutions (more material? faster with the material? – it was striking that within minutes of her first tweet the lady who uploaded the pictures was being asked by institutional news media for interviews). In quest of survival strategies: the nation Revisited towards the conclusion of the 2016 presidential campaign, it is evident that in being based on an event that, whatever the discrepancies in reporting and interpretation, actually happened, this case study covers at most half of the post-Gutenberg conditions for news mediation. The internet (together with the residual mas media and print news media) is riddled with invents masquerading as news of events, and both professionals and audiences are struggling to cope – indeed some outlets – for reasons discussed above, are actively running with them, while others may indeed be the source of misinformation. A whole new function of ‘fact checking’ has emerged in response, interestingly analogous to, and overlapping with, the long established services confirming or debunking urban legends.44 And in relation to the topics discussed here the situation is interestingly asymmetrical, with possibly significant consequences. The segment of the electorate supporting the Democratic candidate, like the campaign itself, tends to reflect the attitudes and approaches within the Journalism Parenthesis in applying a fairly strong notion of gatekeeping: requiring evidence for accusations against the candidate, invoking evidence for accusations against the opponent. The constituency of the Republican candidate in contrast tends to accept almost any averse rumors about the candidates, whatever the state of the conventional evidence, with the distinction that if it is about their candidate they are by and large indifferent, but if about the opponent it is seized on “Omg just witnessed NYPD gun down a pedestrian in Times Square @CNN pic.twitter.com/AMCmFGrSZ4” 44 Best known of which is http://www.snopes.com/ . 43 17 as justification for their vote. The situation of course has an ethical dimension, but in a cultural sciences context it is more significant to explore the nature of this situation, its origins, and possible remedies (should that be a matter of interest). With regard to ‘news’, the Republican constituency is manifestly in a condition in which news is not a category of information qualified by documentation or institutional endorsement, but an amorphous plethora of undifferentiated options which one can consider significant or otherwise, and from which one can pick and chose, according to other criteria. These ‘deplorables’ as they have been called, may be residual preparenthetical folks, brought up in a world of neighbors and kin in which news was transmitted, independently of institutions, under domestic and social auspices. Or they can be ahead of the trend, digital natives for whom journalism and the press and its standards are no longer relevant. Most likely, it seems, is that they are in a perverse hybrid situation where a general extra-parenthetical disregard for journalistic ‘fact’, and a willingness to believe anything out there that suits their purposes, is paradoxically combined with a blind faith in a small number of institutional outlets (TV or internet) which have managed to purloin for themselves the ‘truth’ accolade otherwise shared by most journalism. It remains only to speculate how this situation, should anyone find it alarming, can be remedied, or at least how to jolt such people into a more alert, more critical attitude, to ‘the news’. No amount of documentation or reasoning (for or against a given item), in the manner of Parenthetical journalism, is under the circumstances likely to succeed. There is an at least 65% chance that the persons concerned also believe that “Archaeological findings have confirmed the authenticity of the people and incidents recorded in the Old Testament of the Bible.”.45 Nor would a counter-offensive deploying untruths in support of the opposition cause. From what has been discussed here so far it would seem that the only viable response is to aim at the medium, not the message, that is to focus on the cluster of hubs manifestly decisive in the transmission of material within this particular network. In the given situation attacking their veracity will not work, even in the form of pointing out glaring inconsistencies in the statements of any one of them. The nodes concerned can only be harmed by each other, and every airing of disagreement or dispute between them has a chance of injecting doubt into the minds of their followers. The best reporting skills should be devoted to identifying such internecine strife, and the biggest headlines reserved for its results. ooo 45 https://ncse.com/library-resource/americans-scientific-knowledge-beliefs-human-evolution-year.