Summary
Though journalists openly embrace the "information ideal" and derive authority from the strategies associated with objectivity, they simultaneously employ the "story ideal" and derive authority from the moral force that underlies narrative. This paper uses moments of legal incoherence in the coverage of the jailing of Judith Miller as an opportunity to explore the relationship between objective and narrative authority in journalism. It concludes that these two sources of authority work together to make journalistic accounts appear real both as direct transcriptions of reality and as reflections of a properly ordered moral universe.
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Extract
The Real and the Right: Journalistic Authority and the Coverage of Judith Miller
The jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller in 2005 for refusal to testify before a grand jury led to outcries from journalists and calls for a federal shield law to protect journalists from being forced to reveal information about confidential sources. Miller, like journalists before her, maintained that forcing her to reveal her source's identity would hinder her ability to perform her job and was therefore a violation of the First Amendment. The courts disagreed and the spectacle created by an American journalist sitting in an American jail caused as much indignation and outrage (and detailed news coverage) as one would expect.
And, yet, an odd thing emerged in the news coverage. Along with all the legal details of the case, there appeared an insistent and ubiquitous reminder: Judith Miller had never written a story about the subject of the investigation. No one questions the truth of this fact (i.e., the grand jury was investigating the exposure of undercover CIA agent Valerie Flame's identity and Miller neither published her identity nor did she write any articles about the issue), but its presence is notable because it has no bearing on Miller's jailing. Miller was jailed for refusing to comply with a subpoena. She was not jailed in spite of not having written a story, but with absolutely no regard for whether or not she wrote a story. Why, then, did this legally irrelevant fact permeate news coverage? More important, what can its presence tell us about the process by which journalists construct stories of the real?This paper takes the ubiquitous presence of this legally irrelevant fact as an opportunity to observe the tension in professional journalism between the information ideal, which treats journalism as a mechanism for transmitting crucial facts to a democratically engaged public, and a s...See the full content of this document
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