Press Professionalization and Propaganda: The Rise of Journalisti ...

The evidence is clear: The traditional press has been suffering from a lack of news consumer confidence for some time. It is a development that precedes current debates about news industry business models and the threats of emerging online sources of news. This work maintains that one of the fundamental causes in the diminution of public reliance on the traditional press is journalism’s willingness to provide to the public news that is actually representations of the desires of privileged interests. When one examines how rooted this dynamic is within professional journalism, one can see that public disillusionment with the traditional press should come as no surprise. Citizens see increasing amounts of news that has little relevance to their daily lives but are, instead, reports that reflect the various realities offered by privileged interests. Consequently, as the Pew survey results over the past years have revealed, public trust in the soundness of the press erodes as these interests, through the PR industry, become increasingly successful at helping journalists craft the news.

Before continuing, we should briefly investigate the meanings of the terms “journalistic professionalism,” “propaganda,” and “public relations.” First, we must acknowledge that these terms now mean things that vary from interwar period conceptions. In fact, without a greater awareness of how these terms were understood during that time it is difficult to have an intelligent discussion about the modern dilemma of the strangely symbiotic relationship between journalism and widespread, institutionalized domestic propaganda.

Journalistic Professionalism

Today, journalistic professionalism tends to be an all-encompassingterm, embracing such subsidiary matters as objectivity, sourcing and attribution standards, editorial independence, and newsroom ethics. The concept of journalistic professionalism is sometimes so wide-rangingthat scholars often describe it in tandem with their particular focus in journalism or media studies. For example, media ethics scholars examine professionalism through both the individual and collective conceptions of morals, duties, and obligations.²¹ Other scholars discuss how