What Media Critics Reveal About Journalism

Abstract

In September 2000 Palestine Media Watch (PMW), a group of activists who were critical of American journalism’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, began to lobby journalists to revise their coverage. They lobbied by appealing to professional journalism’s ideal-typical traits and by bombarding news organizations with complaints. This study examines the period between 2000 and 2004 when PMW lobbied newsworkers and does so in order to uncover what journalistic responses to PMW—what criticisms journalists legitimized and what criticisms they rejected—reveal about journalism’s professional ideology. The study finds that journalism’s ideal-typical traits possess a core-like quality that allows critics to make professionally resonating criticisms but that journalism’s fluidity often prevents these criticisms from achieving a “journalistically useful” level in which coverage revisions result. Journalism’s ideal-typical traits are so fluid, in fact, that professional journalists will often denigrate their professional tenets in order to defend whatever content is produced by those denigrated tenets.