Journalism v. History? One of the interesting things about journalism history is the fact that it calls for the integration of two very different -- even antagonistic -- disciplines. By David Abrahamson Northwestern University Head, AEJMC History Division Clio, Fall 2002: The Newsletter of the AEJMC History Division It is a commonplace to say that journalism is a first draft of history, as if journalism, with a bit of cutting and filling, can be remanufactured into the stuff of history. But there are also very important contrasts between the doing of journalism and doing of history, perhaps even antagonisms between the two, that might be worth examining. And in the course of exploring these antagonisms, we can also perhaps speculate on why the antagonisms exist. One possible characteristic is the markedly different intellectual underpinnings of the two disciplines. Obviously, there is a presumption about the doing of history that it involves rigor and deliberateness while there is a presumption about journalism that it involves the press of deadlines. It's also obvious that history's use of sources has a reliance on tangible documentary evidence -- often including journalism itself -- and a clear privileging of print as a source. In contrast, journalism, in a way, is still very much tied to oral traditions. If you think of what an interview provides in terms of information and the essentially assumed lower level of reliability than a print source, there are also very different intellectual starting points to the two disciplines. Moreover, in the doing of history, one must start with a premise: an idea about the reality you are trying to explicate, and you then conduct your scholarship to prove or disprove that premise. In contrast, journalists are taught to abhor a premise. Whether this is in fact true is of course debatable, especially in that the whole nature of objectivity is clearly an arguable construct. The second important contrast concerns the culture of production of the two disciplines. The assumption here is that both disciplines are, in effect, social constructions producing their output under different conditions in different social contexts. For example, the contrast here is the contrast between the culture of the newsroom and the academic culture of the historical profession. Every member of the History Division with experience as a journalism practitioner probably has encountered this in their professional lives. A laundry list of these cultural contrasts might include the following: Journalism is outward looking. History looks inward. This is perhaps a result of the fact that journalism is, by its very nature, intensely collaborative as a discipline. The reporter produces his product, gives it to the editor. The editor does his editing, gives it back to the reporter and very little that appears in its final form is the result of an individual effort. History, in contrast, is far more singular and, despite the role of both mentors and collegial interaction to be found in sessions such as this, it is largely the product of a single mind working in isolation with its sources. There is also in journalism, I think, in a cultural sense, a summarizing imperative. The obligation to capture a moment's worth of reality and deliver it in summary form as quickly as possible, whereas the whole of history is the spirit of inquiry attempts to be far more definitive, tends to take far more time, expend far more resources. I recall a wonderful comment by a student whose first encounter with academic writing was in contrast to her previous professions as a journalist. When I asked, "What do you think of scholarly writing?" she answered that she thought it was "pathologically inclusive." By that, I don't think she was referring to diversity and pluralism. Instead, she was reacting to the inclusion of every single fact, every reference in the relevant literature, etc. Another contrast is that journalism largely is formulaic in tone and perspective. Think of the standard models of news-writing and how journalists try to force their writing into those models, whereas it seems to me that history is more defined by method and structure rather than the tone of the writing itself -- all of which is to say that history is trying to relate the past to the present and journalism is trying to relate the present to the future. If this is true, it might also be true that similar contrasts can be found in the norms by which these two cultural products are valued. History, for example, has professional standards established and policed by peers of associations such as AEJMC and the scholarly press. Journalism largely relies on marked acceptance by the reading and viewing public. In the same sense, the standards of the doing of history do not vary greatly within the discipline. There are few marked regional differences between topics or study periods, whereas in journalism there are significant differences between each media as well as within each medium itself. One more aspect needs to be included, without, I hope, unduly over- idealizing the academy. It may be fair to say that the standards are legitimized in history because they seek to serve some higher goal of knowledge. On the other hand, in journalism -- while the goal is not money per se -- the role of the market in media decisions is infinitely more central than in the discipline of history. Perhaps the sharpest contrast -- when the two professions meet in the classroom. It is, I suspect, an alliance destined to be an uneasy one, and one about which two notions might be profitably kept in mind. The first is that as educators both journalistic and historical, we must always retain a clear sense of the inevitable contrast between history and journalism, to be aware of the differences in message content, in each discipline's politics (by which I mean "politics" with a small "p," or more specifically, each discipline's stance towards reality). We would do well to acknowledge what these differences are, what their possible causes are and what are their likely effects. Lastly and perhaps paradoxically, we must always try to explain the ways in which the two disciplines are co-dependant on each other. By this I mean that, despite the contradictions, it is clear that not only do historians need journalism, but that journalism, if it is to fulfill its social mission at all, clearly has a desperate need for a sense of history. Copyright 2002 David Abrahamson. All rights reserved.