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and governance. This chapter explores how these developments reflect the crystallization within journalism of a problematic double-mindedness that results in the appearance of propaganda as news.
The final chapter, “Journalistic Double-Mindedness: The Legacy of Propaganda and Press Professionalization,” discusses the implications of press double-mindedness. News accounts are often “penetrated” by propaganda when today’s journalists use well-crafted visuals from video news releases supplied by government and corporate entities, commentary from generals coached by the Department of Defense, and ostensibly accurate and objective material that has been secretly crafted by writers in the employ of vested interests. This part of the book examines how propaganda appears as “ready to use” news by providing: (1) supposedly objective experts, (2) prepackaged news text and video and (3) ghostwritten stories as news sources. Using Gandy’s observations about information subsidies and referring to Carey’s and Bourdieu’s insights about journalism’s problems with reflexivity, this chapter then discusses the problematic implications of journalistic double-mindedness.
More than thirty-five years ago, Morris Janowitz made a striking allusion to what this book further examines as journalistic double-mindedness. He noted that American journalists have long been more “concerned with their professional autonomy” than with any desire to reflect on the content in their news reporting. He found this particularly interesting because news workers were constantly deluged with information from professional persuaders. “Professional journalists take such activities for granted and without resentment make use of the provided material as they see fit,” he wrote.17 When seen from a cultural history perspective, Janowitz’s comments are more than just a technical indictment of the work practices of journalism—they point to how the helping hand of propaganda has long been a resource to journalism’s consciousness about how to report reality. Further complicating this picture is that journalism’s routinization of the use of propaganda is a historically situated predilection that is embedded in the sensibilities of the field. As Bourdieu has pointed out, the very nature of habitus orients those in a field to see established work practices as a given, even if they originated in a different time to meet a specific