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It is hard to imagine a human community anywhere in the world, and at any point in human history, where people did not bring news to one another. Hard to imagine a setting in which people did not anticipate – with hope or foreboding or simple curiosity – news from travelers or others who had been away from the village during the day, or news from others close by with gossip to share.

But all human communities through most of the history of the species have managed without a specialized occupation for gathering and disseminating information and commentary on contemporary affairs directed to general audiences: that is, they have been communities without journalism. Indeed, historians typically trace back the origins of journalism only about 400 years, while journalism as a full-time occupation for a contingent of news-gatherers goes back only about 200 years.

For most of the human past, people raised families, worked the soil, gathered nuts and seeds and berries, established governments, conducted diplomacy, raised armies, went to war, developed religious beliefs and practices, built bridges and canals and cathedrals without headlines or tweets, reporters or editors. People wrote songs and poems, love letters and contracts, long before they wrote news stories.

Journalism has not mattered eternally but journalism matters. Many things matter enormously that are as new as or even newer than journalism. Consider electricity. Yes, people can live without it, as they did until about 100 years ago, and as many people in poorer communities still do. In the electrified world, some people intentionally live without electricity on camping trips or religious retreats. Still, most people most of the time in electricity-dependent societies would feel bereft without it. Power outages make normal life impossible even for brief periods. When there is an extended power failure from massive weather events like hurricanes or floods, or through extreme political dysfunction, it is an emergency. It puts lives in danger. There may be disruption of communications, destruction of ongoing experiments in scientific labs or of patient treatment in hospitals, looting in commercial areas, and accidents, crimes, and deaths in darkened homes and streets.

In the modern, urban world, electricity has become a necessity. But what use is journalism? Who really needs it? This is not immediately obvious, at least it is not obvious what journalism uniquely brings. Certainly it brings entertainment, but so do many other things, from video games to a deck of cards to watching or participating in sports to playing with our kids. It brings information, but so do teachers and coaches and physical therapists and books and many other sources. What does journalism do more than or better than or more uniquely than all these others in the information or entertainment it provides?

Some industries or occupational pursuits are selfevidently vital to a good society. Good societies need good doctors, teachers, bus drivers, supermarket cashiers, computer tech support staff, accountants, people with the skills to repair tractors or to prune trees. We depend on many people doing many different jobs every day, from the people who maintain a purified water system to the government officials who inspect the hygiene in restaurants or the safety of bridges and tunnels. The one part of journalism people regularly consult to organize their lives is the weather report. Weather forecasting in most places is undertaken by government agencies, but it gets relayed to the public by news organizations. It is a small element of what professionally gathered and distributed news workers pass on to the public, but people depend on it.

As for the rest of what journalism offers – who needs it?

And, with today’s economically imperiled news organizations, who needs it enough or wants it enough to be willing to pay for it? If people are not willing to pay for it, could it disappear? And if it could disappear, why should any young person looking at the array of vocations in the world be foolish enough to pursue it? Is choosing a career in journalism today likely to be as ill-fated as deciding to manufacture carriages for the horse-and-buggy business a century ago?

These questions are not easy to answer. And journalists have not effectively explained the value of their work to the general public. Scholars who study journalism have not provided much help, either. They have generally been focused on or obsessed by the endless search for evidence, ideally quantified, of how a particular story (say, the Washington Post’s coverage of Watergate) or a particular journalistic cast of mind they disapprove of (for example, news that covers an election by focusing on the “horse race” among candidates rather than on the policy differences among them) influences public opinion and thereby the course of history.

If you can convincingly identify some bit of certainty or high probability that exposure to news media has altered people’s minds and actions, that may be a noteworthy achievement. But I do not think these findings, here and there, from this study and from that, will ever tell us what we would really like to know about the power of the media because (see Chapter 5) they omit the most important, although most subtle, ways the news media make a difference in helping people come to a cognitive reckoning with a complex and changing world.

The world will survive without a lot of the journalism we have today, but the absence of some kinds of journalism would be devastating to the prospects for building a good society, notably a good democratic political system, or so I contend here. I want to champion in particular the production of original reporting that in both general and specific ways holds governments accountable when it is undertaken by reporters and, equally, photographers, documentary film-makers, bloggers, makers of podcasts, and others who operate according to the norms and practices of professional journalism. I will discuss what these norms and practices are and why we should care about them. In the past half-century, professional journalism, organized to tell true stories of contemporary affairs to, for, and sometimes with general audiences, has been particularly concerned to tell these true stories in a way that holds power accountable. In fact, this kind of journalism is now sometimes referred to as “accountability journalism.” It is an apt term. I will give special attention to what this means.

I am not a journalist myself, but in my professional life as a sociologist and historian I have spent more of my time studying journalism than any other part of society. I remain an outsider, but I am persuaded by the authentic self-understanding of professional journalists (and, yes, it is a selfpromoting position too) that journalism is not just a job but a vocation – that it has a public mission, with accuracy of reporting a chief measure of competence, truthfulness an overriding ethic, and a faithful portrait of the contemporary world as its objective. News should be compellingly presented to reach a broad audience even if it offers technical details that will mean more to insiders than outsiders. And unlike most journalism of the past up until the late 1960s, it should be, whenever possible, assertive journalism – assertive in investigating, assertive in analyzing, assertive in challenging people in seats of power.

All of this is easier said than done. Journalism in much of the world is in a long-simmering crisis – its central institutions are floundering economically, its popular appeal is under challenge from both new and old rivals, its self-confidence stumbles. The independence of journalism from state power is under attack in the global wave of populism where “strongmen,” as they are known, vie for power or attain it and then seek to weaken or destroy any media outlets that dare criticize them. Under these circumstances, we need well-reported, compelling, and assertive journalism more than ever. This is the journalism that matters most – reported, compelling, and assertive, and I will elaborate on this model (Chapters 2 and 3).

A journalist’s job is to make news, as a carpenter’s job is to build houses. Both crafts have rules. The primary rule for journalists: put reality first. Responsible journalists learn to not produce fake news, hyped news, or corrupt news. They do not subordinate reality to ideological consistency or political advocacy. They do not curry favor with advertisers or with the publisher’s business interests, or even with the tastes of the audience. Nor should they bow to their own colleagues if the consensus in the newsroom clashes with what they see in the world around them. This – the bias of the inner circle – is especially difficult to resist. What remains true about ethical journalism is just what reporter (and novelist) John Hersey said about it in 1980: “There is one sacred rule of journalism: the writer must not invent. The legend on the license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP.”¹

“None of this was made up” means that all of it is accurate and that, if called upon, the reporter can defend everything he or she has written as true, as accurate. This is the most boring thing we can say about a news story – “it is accurate.” But this is also quite possibly the most important thing that can be said. When Robert Pear, New York Times Washington, DC-based health care reporter, died in 2019, the Times printed a letter to the editor from Thomas S. Crane, a health care lawyer in Massachusetts, who remembered Pear’s “complete dedication to detail and fairness and his breadth of knowledge of the politics of the health care industry.” On one occasion when Pear asked him for some help on a story, Crane recalled, “We went round and round about a single sentence because of his compulsiveness for accuracy. After the third phone call that day, I finally persuaded him that the sentence was legally accurate and otherwise unassailable.”² For a reporter, “a compulsiveness for accuracy” is very high praise.

A second rule for journalists is a good deal more complicated than it sounds: follow the story. Follow the story, don’t follow a wish, don’t hew to a line, don’t submit to a fashion, don’t go along with the crowd. Follow the story. To follow the story means that one cannot and should not anticipate where the story is going to go; one risks losing fidelity to reality if political, partisan, ideological preconceptions or loyalties block off the trail that may lead to “inconvenient truths,” facts and patterns of facts that show one’s favorite persons, parties, and causes in an unfavorable light.

Moreover, although Rule One – do the reporting, don’t make stuff up – and Rule Two – follow the story – are both primary directives for professional journalism, they are in tension with each other. Don’t make things up but do assemble the facts into a story that is not only coherent but also emotionally compelling. And that makes for a perennial battle between tedious, “eat your spinach” journalism and the stories that grab an audience and don’t let go.

For a century now, a powerful trend in the world of newspapers, carried over also into news magazines, radio, television, and online news, has been professionalization. Newspapers emerged and continued for generations before any of them hired reporters, but from roughly the 1820s on in the United States, and a bit later in Western Europe, reporting became the central task of journalism. A French journalist, after visiting America in 1886, held that “reporting is in the process of killing journalism” – that is, in US newspapers straightforward accounts of events of the day – particularly events of the past 24 hours – dominated while in France discursive essays of political advocacy, theory, and philosophy held sway.³

But doesn’t a passion for factual reporting fly in the face of the truth that presumed “facts” are just opinions in masquerade? That everything is relative, it just depends on the standpoint you start from? Most college sophomores walk into Philosophy 1 believing that “it’s all relative.” That’s what makes them “sophomoric.” And none of them actually believes that everything is relative. If their computer malfunctions, they do not pray that it be fixed by divine intervention, nor do they normally kick the computer (unless empirical experience has taught them that that works well). What do they do? They seek expert assistance. They may look for it themselves online or they may contact tech support. They actually believe there is an answer and it’s not all relative. Some approaches will solve the problem and others will not. The computer works or it doesn’t. The milk smells spoiled or it smells fresh or sometimes you are not quite sure and you taste it for a second source of empirical evidence, adding taste to smell. You certainly do not conclude that it doesn’t matter because everything is relative and everything is positional and everything is subjective anyway so go ahead and serve the milk to your kids. We move through our lives figuring out what is real versus what is imagined, what is external reality versus what is a wish or a fear – every hour, every day.

What I will try to do in the pages to follow is to make a case for the utility of a professional journalism that seeks truth and chips away at it with a competent command of journalistic fact-gathering practices, turning documented facts into stories and analysis that engage an audience, and with an effort to assert itself rather than to defer to power.

In a reflective and illuminating recollection of his 20 years as editor in chief of the UK’s the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger writes a dramatic chapter on the efforts of a Parliamentary committee to pinion him, if not imprison him, for his newspaper’s publishing Edward Snowden’s revelations of America’s and Britain’s surveillance of their own citizens. And he concludes the chapter with a sentence that begins, “You need proper journalism because …” He leaves the sentence unfinished. He follows it with this: “But how did that sentence end? Because … we are independent of other forms of power? Because what we do is in the public interest? If we couldn’t agree on what the public interest looked like, how could we expect others to rally to that bedraggled cause?”⁴ Rusbridger’s unfinished sentence swings in the wind. This book is my effort to complete it.