Time, realism, news

Abstract

News time has since the late 19th century moved away from storytelling to embrace modern progress. But time in news is elusive. The digital era splinters time, leaving news practice and research behind. A project to track US news into the 21st century documents a history of time in news: the realism of ‘who’, ‘where’, and ‘what’ declined, and the modernism contexts of ‘when’ and ‘why’ expanded. All five Ws moved contrary to expectation. Modernism tries to map time, but its definition is undecidable – even among logicians. Practitioners of news grapple with their topic: the realist now, and try to fit it into the modernist ‘standard time’, a time regime that imposes a big-picture interpretation onto their readers. The modern view equates clock time, a purely social invention, to quantifiable nature. Clock time offers an artificial view of the passage of time, but scientists dictated another big picture. ‘For us’, wrote Einstein, ‘who are convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future has no other meaning than that of an illusion, though a tenacious one’. Time, although quantifiable, does not pass; its passing is an illusion and the objective view of the world is an immutable one. Coming to grips with the elusiveness of time, as it slips away from reporters and the grasp of scientists, creates opportunities for practitioners of news to align with contemporary mediated experiences. Facing the problem of time is done through Alfred North Whitehead, in whom the present moments is not a point of infinitessimal length on a single modernist time-line but an indivisible event that ‘grows literally by buds or drops’ of experience (William James in Whitehead), a landing ground which he calls the ‘actual occasion.’ Past, present, and future are not illusions, but symptoms of the subjective experience of process, which is not only real; it is part of the fundamental actual occasion. Weaving in Arendt’s distinction between ephemeral labor and permanent work illustrates how process philosophy can be grounded in both the labor and work of journalists, allowing news practitioners to adapt to digital times.