Paper #6

Two major possibilities for this essay (5 pp., due Thurs. 7 November). Both rely in differing ways on articles by Darnton, Romano, Carey, Sigal, and Schudson read in the last week; the second draws on your viewing of All the President's Men (dir. Alan Pakula, 1976) and your reading of Edward J. Epstein's "Did the Press Uncover Watergate?" (Arianna's report on Michael Schudson's "Watergate and the Press" in his The Power of the News (1995) will be useful, too.)

Write an essay closely reading and comparing two or three news reports of the same "story," i.e. the same event or series of events, published in different American newspapers or archived by a broadcast news collection like the one Lexis-Nexis provides. Use what you have learned about news coverage and newswriting conventions to explain the differences between the stories and why they matter -- what they show about events and what they show about the codes in which those events are reported. Much in your reading will depend on your understanding of nuances of language, sequences of narrative and exposition, identification of sources (named or otherwise identified), attributions of meaning (whether by "explanation" or other meaning-making devices). Much, too, will depend on your informed understanding of "what makes this story -- i.e. this event or series of events -- news" or what the "story" in the story "really" is.

You are free to focus your essay around a concept like "objectivity" or "explanation" or even "news" (i.e. what it is), and you can use remarks from Darnton and from the Reading the News authors to organize your discussion. Unlike the assignment for Essay #4, though, this does not ask you to test a controversial model that claims to offer radical explanations why the news is and is not covered as it is (or isn't). Consider the contributors to Reading the News as collaborators in working out a way of reading, an approach to news reading that rejects the "naive realism" or the "mirror" theory of truth that assumes that the press covers an easily identified set of "facts" that exist naturally in the world. "The essays in this book," writes Carey,

Exploring that code is your job on this assignment.

But what "story"? Finding and defining it is up to you. It can be contemporary, or it can be from the recent or even the distant past via news archives or Lexis-Nexis. Among candidate news accounts, look for

Above all, look for what's arresting, "on the edge," revelatory. Simply to confirm some of the dicta of the Reading the News authors will be less interesting than to show how the codes they write about help to explain differences between accounts, news organizations, or media.

For this project, it may not be useful to look at differences between domestic and foreign coverage or between mainstream and alternative media (although I can imagine ways of using such differences to find stories eligible for investigation).

"Watergate" -- narrowly, the evolving story covered by U.S. media led by, but not limited to, the Washington Post in 1972-73-- is said to have transformed American journalism by departing radically from time-honored relationships between the press and its subject-matter and individual reporters and their news organizations. In other words, "Watergate" was one big "aberration story" in which the press did what the press did not usually do.

Yet "Watergate" could also be thought of as the outcome of entirely conventional newsgathering and newsmaking practices such as are described by Darnton and the Reading the News authors. And the "myth" of Watergate itself, as developed in Pakula's (and Woodward and Bernstein's) All the President's Men, could be thought of as the quintessential product of the "reality-making practices" which mainstream American news media perform all the time. In other words, the more "mythic" the Watergate story is thought to be, the more perfectly it fulfills the conventions and expectations that the press imposes on its material.

Adjudicate this question. I'm not suggesting you read the voluminous coverage itself (which is available on microform in the C.U. periodicals collection but not, to my knowledge, in electronic form) but be guided by what you learn from the film, Epstein, Arianna's report on Schudson's article, and the three-page "Chronology" I'll distribute from Woodward and Bernstein's sequel to ATPM, The Final Days (New York: Avon Books, 1976), 510-514. Your essay should, of course, make illuminating reference to Darnton and Reading the News.