Journalism is the civic institution that makes democratic self-governance possible by providing the information that self-governance requires. This is what it is for. Whether it does it is a different question.
The Civic Function
The civic theory of journalism — the understanding of journalism as the institution that provides democratic citizens with the information they need to participate in self-governance — assigns journalism a function that is foundational to democratic governance rather than incidental to it. Citizens who cannot know what their government is doing, what their political representatives are deciding, or what consequences the policy choices before them would produce cannot meaningfully govern themselves. Journalism is the institution that gathers, verifies, and makes accessible the information that the exercise of democratic citizenship requires — and without which the formal mechanisms of democracy — elections, deliberation, representation — cannot function as their theory requires.
The gap between the civic theory of journalism and the practice of journalism that the current media environment produces is significant. The civic theory requires journalism that covers the decisions of the powerful, that provides the context and analysis that allows information to be understood, that corrects false claims with equal prominence to their original distribution, and that serves the informational needs of the full citizenry rather than the entertainment preferences of specific audience segments. The media environment that the commercial imperatives and the attention economy have produced consistently prioritises the engaging over the important, the episodic over the contextual, and the audience-affirming over the audience-challenging. The gap between what journalism is for and what the media environment produces is the civic deficit that the journalism crisis represents.
Journalism is for democratic self-governance. The media environment that has developed around the commercial imperatives of the attention economy is not primarily for democratic self-governance — it is for audience capture. The civic deficit that results — the gap between what democratic citizens need to know and what the media environment provides — is not a journalism failure in the individual sense. It is a governance failure in the institutional sense: the failure to build the institutional conditions for the journalism that democracy requires.
Discussion