Michael Schudson on American democracy and the press

I'm very much looking forward to hearing from our guest Wednesday night. He's Michael Schudson, professor of communication at UC-San Diego, who will help us thinking through the relationship between the press and American democracy, and how that is likely to change with the emergence of the Internet and digital media.

One thing that's worth noting as we read Schudson's chapter on the history of American news media in "The Press:" While we're going through dramatic changes now, we need to remember that the press, and the press' business model, have hardly been a constant thing. I was struck by this sentence in Schudson's chapter, which he co-wrote with Susan Tifft: Printers in colonial America, they said, "pretty much invented the newspaper as they went along, amid their efforts to make money selling stationery, printing wedding announcements, running the post office, or even selling from their print shops such sundries as chocolate, tea, snuff, rum, beaver hats, patent medicines, and music instruments." (Don't forget beaver hats, entrepreneurial journalists!)

Same thought applies to the objective story form. While it achieved Holy Grail status in the last half of the 20th century, it was hardly the form that nourished American democracy for most of its first two centuries of existence. Might that make us feel differently about the prospect of an anything-goes environment on the Internet where advocacy might become the most popular form?

I'm interested in hearing Prof. Schudson talk about the salient characteristics defining the relationship between the press and American democracy. And also his take on how that's likely to change in a world where legacy media declines and a more decentralized digital newsplace rises. What would you like to know from our speaker?

By the way, Prof. Schudson's colleague at UCSD is Daniel C. Hallin, who participated in an interesting discussion with new-media leader Jay Rosen recently on Rosen's blog, "Press Think." Rosen had been using a model developed by Hallin, describing how the press decides what to cover, to question whether it's such a good thing to have the press being the arbiter of what's fair game for debate and what's not. The implication of Rosen's treatise: Digital media will shove aside the arbiters, and isn't that a good thing?

Hallin's response: Not so fast. Here's a key line: "I think journalists often play an important role as an independent source of information, and in many ways I'd like to see them playing a stronger role, not a weaker one, in shaping the public sphere. I'd like to see them play that role in a more independent and thoughtful way than they often do, but I would not like to see them vanish from the political scene--which to some extent is actually happening as media companies cut newsroom budgets."

I wonder if our speaker agrees with this.