ICA presents. Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship Podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today our architect is Michael Schudson. Dr. Schudson is currently a Professor of Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School. During his career, Dr. Schudson has authored and co-edited over a dozen books focusing on American news media, advertising, and cultural memory. Dr. Schudson has also been the recipient of various honors including: ICA Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellow. Today Dr. Schudson is in conversation with Dr. Lynn Berger. Joining us from the Netherlands, Dr. Berger is currently a journalist and the Care Correspondent for The Dutch news website, De Correspondent. In addition to her journalism, Dr. Berger is also a writer with her work primarily focusing on family dynamics, manifestations of care, and cultural keywords. Here is Dr. Berger.
I was a PhD student in the Communication program at Columbia University. And Michael was my professor there, as well as my dissertation advisor, together with Andie Tucher. And he taught me a great deal about pursuing the history of ideas and ideals. More generally, I would say he showed me how to be a person in the world while trying to understand that world in the best possible way. The notion that objectivity is the hallmark of journalism, or that there is such a thing as a "right to know", might seem timeless and self-evident, but Michael Schudson has shown us that these are all fairly recent inventions. Ethical ideals have a history, a specific way in which they came to be, and they're also often wrong in the sense that reality tends to be much more complicated than these ideals suggest. In tracing their histories, Michael Schudson models a way of looking at the world that is both highly critical and highly careful, which is what I love about his work. Michael, it's wonderful to see you.
Great to see you, Lynn.
In keeping with the architecture metaphor, I thought we would start at the foundation, the groundworks of your career. So, you have an MA and a PhD in Sociology from Harvard University. What made you turn to sociology? And how did you go from there to the field of communications?
As an undergraduate, I took an English class my first semester, this was Swarthmore College, and I got a C+ on my first paper. I had never seen such a grade before and I thought, "Well, I'm not going to be a great poet or novelist." I was interested in understanding parts of the world. I took a lot of courses in political science but it seemed dry and too full of institutions and not enough people. Sociology and anthropology was more to my taste, and that became my major.
And were you always interested in the sociology of ideas?
In a conversation with one of my advisors, David Riesman, I can picture where this was at the Harvard faculty club, I said, "You know, I don't think it's really the history of ideas that is my interest, it's the history of ideals." I remember just saying that out loud and I think that was right. And I came to that again and again, through the years.
What was it about the history of ideals?
That's a good question. I thought I would not be a history major as an undergraduate because I thought anyone can do that, and I apologize to all historians for that naivety. Your place in the cycle of history is important too. The country was turning upside down over the Vietnam War. Why did we ever think we should be spreading our notion of democracy? When did we get our sense of our own history? Which I now think we've badly misunderstood in many ways. We think of having been a democracy since 1789 but the Founding Fathers hated the idea of democracy. They wanted anything but democracy. I have been interested in kind of understanding my place and things I believe in that might have turned out to be not correct. What myths are in my head? I am interested in the myths in the heads of Conservatives and Republicans in the US who believe all kinds of idiocies. But maybe I have believed some idiocies too and it's trying to understand my own mind and the minds of people around me.
Maybe you can only become interested in the idiocies in other people's heads once you've fully grappled with your own misunderstandings.
This reminds me of "The Road Not Taken". In the US, it gets recited at every eighth grade graduation because it fits his or her teachers idea of what the moral challenge of middle school is. Resist peer pressure, that's the message of the poem. And that's how, for most of my life, I understood the poem. But if you listen to the poem carefully, the poor person at this crossroads has no idea, no idea at all, which is the road less traveled, they look the same. So, why did this road that he took make such a difference? He's not even saying it did. He's saying "Somewhere in the future, I'm going to say 'I was the pioneer, I was the one who went off on my own.'" And it's really a poem about mythmaking, the stories we tell about ourselves. But the eighth-grade graduations go on as they always have, reciting the poem
To go back a little bit to the foundation, which was sociology, how did you move from there to communications?
There wasn't very much of a sociology of media, at the time. My PhD was just not a significant subfield. My topic was related to the sociology profession; occupations and professions was, in fact, a subfield, not a well-populated one. Expansion of the role of the media and the study of it has been enormous since then. At the time I did, in fact, get hired by a sociology department. But I think that was connections more than it was merit or interest in my topic.
Your dissertation focused on the notion of professionalism and objectivity in journalism and in law.
Some people said, "Well, the law part really is not fascinating, drop the law part." So I thought, well, I'd like it to be a book, I'll drop the law part. It attracted some immediate attention from the world of communication. I remember I gave a talk at University of Illinois and spoke to the communication people more than to the sociology people. And I said, "What is this field?" There was no communication program at Swarthmore, there was no communication department at Harvard. I had no experience with it. And I knew it was there but I didn't know very much about it. In a way I didn't move to communication, communication moved toward me or found me and said, "Oh, I think you're one of us."
Did you agree once you understood what the field, as nascent as it maybe was, comprised?
I did and I didn't, and I still feel a little bit of an immigrant to the field of communication. I've learned a lot from communication scholars, some of my best friends are communication scholars. I was not the founder of either the Department of Communication at UC San Diego and the Ph. D. program at Columbia but I was one of the figures who, with others, helped put together these two programs. They were and are still kind of radically interdisciplinary. We encouraged all of our students to explore other departments, not feel limited in any way. They all have studied well beyond the usual limits of what communication is as a field.
I wanted to talk a bit about method. I was re-reading some of your articles, including a favorite of mine called "Politics as Cultural Practice" from 2010. In it, you describe the principles that have guided your work as a scholar. The first one is, whatever phenomenon you look at, try to see it located in space and in time. And the second one, is draw what you see. Which is to say, if you're in a figure drawing class, you should draw the model, not your idea of the model. And if you're a scholar, you should, and I quote, "Allow the empirical world to work on you." And I was also dipping back into your most recent book "Journalism: Why it Matters." In that one, you describe the rules by which journalism operates: put reality first, follow the story, not a wish or a theory, but the story. It seems to me, that draw what you see and follow the story are the same rule or the same principle. Do you think that's right? Are you, in a way, an academic journalist?
Draw what you see is, in fact, a principle of what I try to do. It's the method beyond method. It was the mantra of a teacher in a life drawing class. The teacher would walk around the room and he would look at my drawing and then he would say, "Michael, draw what you see." And I said, "But isn't that what I'm doing?" And he said, "No, you're drawing what you think a figure on the page is supposed to look like. There's a theory in your head. Get rid of that theory. I don't want theory, I want you to really, really look." And I came to see that he was right. If you're sitting with your legs crossed, the kneecap looks really big. And I made it smaller because it can't look back big. But it does look that big. So draw that. And that, I think, is what journalists try to do. It's what, I think social scientists and historians should try to do. It's not easy. Keep reality in front of you. That's a very hard dictum to follow and it can lead you to any number of methods, quantitative, qualitative, as long as you keep that in the forefront.
Was there a time where you were drawing what you saw, and realized it was something else than you had thought you would draw beforehand, in your research?
I think the answer is yes. Often people are told to come up with a hypothesis that they're going to test. They figure out a way to test it, then they conduct the experiment or do the research. And what I've learned is you start with a hunch. The research takes you- dozens of roads are in the woods and you cannot follow all of them. You do the best you can and some of them will keep coming back to that same trail and you find, "Oh, maybe that's the hypothesis." You may wind up with something that is different from anything you had in your head in the beginning. In "Discovering the News", I really thought I would find the origins of objectivity in the early commercialization of the press - 1830s the penny papers in the US. And no one's talking about objectivity. No one's worried about that. They're stepping stones for political careers. That's not the professionaized journalism that we see today. And so, where did it come from? Some time after World War One, at the very point at which journalists find that everything is subjective, that's when objectivity arises as a defensive mechanism. That was a discovery.
I'm wondering if now, in journalism, there's an opposite mechanism where everyone has realized that objectivity doesn't really exist, so we might as well embrace our subjectivity as journalists and announce beforehand, "This is who I am, this is where I come from, as I tell you this story."
I certainly see distinguished journalists and journalism educators throwing up their hands and saying, "There's no such thing. There never has been." But they're wrong. I mean, I suppose there's no such thing as love either. There's no such thing as integrity. We have lots of ideals that we never fully managed to realize. That doesn't mean some features of it don't exist. An example I use is that in everyday life, we often try to make ourselves somewhat more objective, "I'm going to put my subjectivity aside." Can I do that fully? No way. But can I sort of do it? Yeah, we can sort of do it.
What is your relationship as a scholar to theory?
Long ago, I took a course called "Modern Social Theory" and that was my first introduction to Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Tocqueville. I learned something from each of them. And I'm wary of a one size fits all theory. I think they're incomplete. We need to just acknowledge that. More recently, I came upon some really interesting work in history of science by Melinda Baldwin, a historian of physics, which is not exactly my specialty, but she was writing on the history of peer review. We trace our scientific roots back to the Enlightenment and the emergence of research universities. But peer review doesn't go back that far. She traces it back to the 19th century and in full-fledged form to the years of university expansion after World War Two. This was another light bulb turning on for me. We keep pushing back to say, "Things we're doing now, they're eternal." Journalism goes back to Benjamin Franklin, or much further even. Not really, not as we know it. And Benjamin Franklin's journalism didn't have any reporters. Journalism without reporters? Well, that's basically what the 18th century provided.
So, if there are these sort of things that seem self-evident, these myths that you've tried to dismantle, are there myths that the field of communications or of journalism unknowingly espouses?
That is what I call "media centrism". One should in sociology and economics, be a little cautious. It's easy in media studies or communication to say, "Oh, the media did it." Or "The media has all this influence." A current example that I'm puzzling over now, although I'm no authority on it, is how important is social media in leading to extremism? The public conversation, it's everywhere, the notion that it's the social media that does it, is ruining the world. Then political scientists, some economists, have said, "Well, let's see if we can study this empirically." So far, as I've seen as an onlooker at this research, they don't find it or they find little bits of it. So far, it just doesn't confirm what everyday conversation seems to presume. So, this media centrism continues.
What are the less visible forces or institutions that shape our lives in the world that maybe media scholars should pay more attention to?
Not to side too quickly with the economist but getting a living is pretty important. We're seeing that again and again. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is threatening the supply chains of precious metals and foods too. And that's going to matter. It's mattering in Russia already, it's maybe mattering elsewhere as well. The everyday experience of making a living is important. So are political institutions. Political parties, and the leadership of political parties, and the whole question of leaders and leadership matters. All of these things make enormous influence, apart from the media. The media are related, for sure. Experts talk with the media, political leaders clearly talk with the media as much as they can, but sometimes not.
If we talk about the challenges for communications scholarship in the next decade, would giving these other institutions and forces their proper place be one of them.?
Yes, I guess that is self-serving here in a way because it's what we've tried to preach at UCSD and Columbia these days. But I do think giving a rightful place to other people with other traditions who are studying the world, including media, is really important. Toward the beginning of the pandemic, I was at a university-wide committee that looked at 10 decisions across the university. I was part of the system but I was impressed with the system of peer review. This was a committee that reviewed the peer review method in each of the departments: biomedical sciences, economics, history, and literature. And it generated fascinating discussions. I've never had such a demanding or fun committee. I remember what a prior member of this committee told me he said, "I'm not as smart as all these people I'm judging." Mostly we don't know about them because we're in our own small field. I was helpful in getting US journalism located in time but it's only much later that I saw oh, I need to locate it into the space too.
What are the impacts or the contribution that is seemingly large, but also small field, of communication can make the rest of the world, outside of the university?
I think there are a lot of specific contributions. What does communication as a field know about persuasion? How do you frame a message in the best possible way? I am convinced that vaccinations tend to work. How do you convince people that they could save their children's lives? My own curiosities have led me in other directions toward, "How do we understand communication and the media in a broader sense?" Not, "How do we solve a particular problem?" Though I'm all in favor of solving particular problems. But you have to follow your own instincts and do work that you enjoy and that makes you think harder than you did before. I think it has made in scholars I admire and and in students I've worked with, better understandings of where we fit into the greater scheme of things.
Thank you for talking to me today and for your scholarship. Looking forward to your next publications and projects.
Thank you, as I look forward to yours.
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network and is sponsored by The Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Our producer is Sharlene Burgos. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening!
