What Are Journalists For? Quotes

“If Americans increasingly disdained politics because it didn't seem real to them, then journalism had to start revising its view of what the whole thing was about.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“At the heart of republicanism,' writes E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post, 'is the belief that self government is not a drab necessity but a joy to be treasured. It is the view that politics is not simply a grubby confrontation of competing interests but an arena in which citizens can learn from each other and discover an 'enlightened self-interest' in common.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“Both Wichita projects recognize that beyond information, the press sends us an invitation to experience public life in one manner or another.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“Trying to be an honest observer, Seelye wound up describing her colleagues as players, people who help shape the scene they also survey. Which left hanging a question: If the press shapes the politics we have, then how can it shape the politics we need?”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“Against the soaring rhetoric of American democracy, Lippmann reminded readers of the limitations of the average citizen, the stubborn realities of human nature, the daunting complexity of modern life, and the prosaic facts of manipulation.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“Democracy for Dewey meant not a system of government but a society organized around certain principles: that every individual has something to contribute, that people are capable of making their own decisions, that given the chance they can understand their predicament well enough to puzzle through it, that the world is knowable if we teach ourselves how study and discuss it. Time and again Dewey argued that to be a democrat meant to have faith in people's capacities, whatever their recent performance.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“He noted how politics had been faltering while journalists trained a skeptical eye on it. 'Essentially, we've let the politicians frame the debates and the issues. We've put the Boys on the Bus to follow them, and while were preoccupied with this, the issues of real importance of the people were not addressed. The people felt disenfranchised from the political process, so why would they want to read about it?”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“Journalism at its best is an art practiced against this temptation. It can halt traffic, arrest our attention, say to us: 'here's something you didn't know,' or 'listen to this amazing story,' or 'let's think about that.' Done well, these pieces stop time, allowing us a glimpse of a world made more intelligible--and thus more available to our civic senses.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“Journalists are ... responsible both for what they see and for what they do.

It is a journalist's responsibility to reveal the system, help voters understand the possibility of gaining access to and engaging it, should they choose, to educate, explain and expose.

We can do that in many ways: by exposing its shortcomings, by telling who wields influence and how, by explaining the roles of process and personality and politics on policy-making, by laying out and explaining the choices the public faces in dealing with difficult issues, by helping people understand complex issues, by allowing people to hear voices like their own in discussion, by turning away from the debate between extremes toward deliberation of realistic options, by giving voters a prominent position in the electoral process ... by encouraging public discussion.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“Sandel writes of a 'formative politics,' one that equips citizens to be actors with others, as against a procedural view, which assumes that the system is simply there, and we work it to our advantage or drop out. To him, democracy as self-government 'means deliberating with fellow citizens about the common good and helping to shape the destiny of the political community.' It 'requires a knowledge of public affairs,' but also a 'sense of belonging, a concern for the whole, a moral bond with the community whose fate is at stake.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“By 1995, journalists are also seen as 'connectors,' putting scattered publics in touch with one another. They create and cultivate a public space, the pages of the newspaper, into which citizens are invited. They remain watchdogs, but not just of government; citizens, too, can be held accountable. Finally, the journalist is viewed as an exemplary citizen, trying to lend some dignity to public life, treating the affairs of democracy as a serious business, rather than a game or a hustle.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“The ultimate tough story, the ultimate scandal', he wrote, 'is that America's public life does not accomplish the long term goals of the American people.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“Acknowledging to one another that their aim was not just to do good journalism but to improve democracy with journalism felt to them like a breakthrough.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“Estranged from the political system 'because they feel they have no control over it and that it has no connection to their lives,' citizens find only further estrangement in the news, which treats politics 'as a game to be played to by insiders and pros.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“Life is a conversation. When you enter it is already going on. You try to catch the drift of it. You exit before it's over.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“If there are no rewards for participating in public life, if there is no story into which people can insert themselves, if there is no hope of joining a conversation that might get us somewhere, if there is no point in membership, then the prospect we face is to become a nation of drifters, seeking from private motion that sense that public life is supposed to provide when it works well.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?

“Journalists make it their business to be knowledgeable and alert. They come to work ready to play a part in a public drama, even as they fill a job in a private business. Through this steady work they stand for something: the argument that democracy and dcivic life are an everyday affair and everyone's business.”
― Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For?