Theoretical Foundations
Media and Democracy: A Philosophical Framework
By Jim Carey
Jul 17, 2002, 10:29pm

The following speech was delivered at a seminar organized by The Project on Public Life and the Press.

JAY ROSEN: Jim Carey has been writing on the subject of the press and public life for 25 years---since, he told me, around the period of the Vietnam War, but that's not why he is here. He's here because he has written so well on public life and the press, and he's though so carefully about it. When people say things like, everything I know about public life I learned it from Jim Carey, I now understand what they are saying. It's not that everything you know you learned from him. It's that everything you know began with him. That's the way it was for me.

       When I read his essays about ten years ago, I said, this guy's onto something, and I never regretted that assumption. Jim was for many years the dean of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois. Why he elected to do that, I have no idea, but he often refers to himself as a recovering dean. He's currently a professor of journalism at Columbia University. He's written hundreds of essays. He's also on the board of the Public Broadcasting System--just part of his own dedication to public life. And he's a real treat to listen to.



JIM CAREY: Thank you, Jay. Well, I hope I'm a treat to listen to. I lost my notes on the way down. My bag disappeared and I got my notes about five minutes before I arrived here. I was assembling them at the table. I hope I don't get too lost on you.

       Jay has already talked about two aspects of public journalism---the practice of it and the theoretical or philosophical aspect of it. If I were to slice the pie, I would do it just a bit differently and say there are three parts.

       One part is what has largely been done up to now---to undertake reporting projects that, within the structures of the normal life of journalism, try to do something different. That might involve covering an election campaign in a slightly different way, to see what the consequences are.

       The second part is to reflect upon those experiment to try to figure out what one is doing and the vocabulary with which to describe it. This is more or less the philosophical side.

       The third part is what will come next: What would it mean not to undertake a project and not to philosophize about it, or reflect upon it, but to live it as a practice? To be it?

       It would be the same thing we imagine when we ask ourselves, depending upon what we are now, what it would be like to live one's life as a Jew or a Muslim or a Christian? Or, if one's orthodox, to live as reformed. We imagine becoming something else, and seeing the practices of one's life as well as the meaning and significance of our life transformed in some way.

       For many years, when I was a dean at Illinois, one of my happiest tasks was to teach an introductory humanities seminar for doctoral students, for the School of Humanities. It was one of these yearlong surveys. We usually started with eighteenth-century British philosopher David Hume and ended with present-day French philosopher and literary critic Jacques Derrida, and the question always went, what would it be like to live the life David Hume recommends? Or what would it be like to live the life that Karl Marx or Emile Durkheim or Max Weber suggests? What would it mean to really be this?

       I used to teach by trying to become them. Not by talking about their theories, but living them in class. One day, I would be David Hume. Another day, I'd be Emile Durkheim. I would enact the practices of thinking and arguing, feeling and believing, as though I were that person.

       In a way, that leads me to what I believe is the next step or the final step of this project, and that is what I want to talk a bit about tonight-not so much of a project and the

philosophy, but more a way of life and the philosophy.

       Let me begin with a scene and a text, and then we'll see what happens after that. The scene occured Sunday in New York at Columbia University, where I teach. We were celebrating the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, and the celebration was an imitation, right down to the details, of its opening night ten years ago. Indeed, we even had the same speaker-broadcast journalist Robert MacNeil-but an older wiser Robert MacNeil soon to retire from PBS to become a novelist and writer on a different order.

       When he was asked to speak ten years later, he asked the staff of the Freedom Forum to summarize everything that happened in the world of media since his earlier speech-everything the center had done, so he might reflect upon it then and now.

       It was an unusually gifted presentation because he is a wonderful writer. It was brilliantly composed. Yet a tone of bitterness kept seeping into the prose-quite uncharacteristic for MacNeil. The further he went one year after another reflecting on this, the more disillusioned he seemed to become. What had started out as a celebration of a decade of achievement ended up with his two concluding lines-maybe there were three-they went something like this: "I've spent 40 years as a journalist. It is an honest and honorable and noble life and I've never regretted it for a moment. But now I am taken to be a media worker and the media stink!"

Then he sat down.

       Now, in the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, that last line left everyone a little stunned. What is he getting at? What kind of an assessment is this, after all? But you and I immediately recognize the tension he's getting at there. He says, in essence, "I've been largely practicing on television but I could have practiced it anywhere, anyplace, over a long period of time. I could have practiced it in different organizations with different technologies under different systems of economics. The practice of living the life of a journalist is not the same thing as being on television, or in newspapers, or in magazines. It is a way of being in the world, not merely a bureaucracy. To confuse the two is to fail what is decent about all of this and what drew me to it in the first place."

       He probably was saying the edges of this craft have gotten fuzzy-where does the journalist end and the talk show host begin? What are the distinctions between the MacNeils and the Geraldos-in both his own eyes and the eyes of the public, the people out there.  How can we tell them apart anymore? Or can we? Now, the questions become more insistent  and more confusing. And it doesn't get any better when we move from reporting in television to reporting in the world of cyberspace, where distinctions start to break down even more and become even more troubling.

       Now for my part, this matter of reflecting on these decaying edges and these distinctions is a philosophical project I've been trying to get the intelligence in universities to think through in some systematic way. We also need to think about the new world that new forms of technology are bringing about, and how one can practice a craft, really practice it, in virtual reality, for virtual means two things here. It means virtual in the sense of a mirror that reflects an imitation or simulation. But the word "virtual" comes from the word "virtue." It means to live certain virtues in that world. And so the question is, what are the virtues of journalism? What are the virtues inherent in it? What does it mean to be this?

       That's the scene. The text is this: One of the great books of recent years, I think, is by a wonderful, distinguished journalist, Robert Coles, who you immediately say is a psychiatrist. But Coles' series of books on the children of crises, what's happened to modern children, is one of the great achievements in modern journalism.

       One of his reflective books of about five years ago is titled The Call of Stories. What he means by it is, what does it mean to be called a story-teller-to be summoned to be one? What does it mean to both tell and listen? To do both? He takes you through listening to these tiny black children braving the white mobs in the south when the schools were integrated, how they understood what was happening to them, how he listened, and how he interpreted it and brought it to us.

       In the first chapter, he makes a sharp distinction between what he calls theories and what he calls stories. In doing that, he reviews his own training. Freely translated, he says, when I came into psychiatry and started doing my first internship out of the Harvard Medical School at Massachusetts General, I was trained by the senior staff psychiatrist, to whom I reported. He sent me out into the ward to do my work among these mentally ill patients and when I'd come back in he'd say, "What did you observe?" I would start to talk about these people. He would immediately stop me and say, "What did you observe?" I would have to go through and, patient by patient, tick off their symptoms, their behavior, their ticks, their quirks. At the end he would say, "What's wrong? Diagnose them." And I would say, "A catatonic schizophrenic. A maniac depressive." That was it.

       I treating the patient, I was  instructed everytime they said something about themselves that did not fit with the diagnosis, my task was to say, "You're deluding yourself. You are sick. You are schizophrenic. Please don't think you are a journalist on temporary leave in the mental institution. You are now authentically part of this institution because you've been so diagnosed."

       That led Coles to almost want to leave psychiatry, as a business not worth doing for the very simple reason that no one got any better. Classifications were made, people were diagnosed, and categories were spelled out. But people remained sick.

       He then fell under the spell of another doctor who never asked about a symptom or a diagnosis. All he said was, "Tell me about your patients." So Coles started to tick off the symptoms and this doctor said, "I don't want to hear the symptoms of the patient. I am not interested. Tell me about the patient's life." Coles finally realized that the doctor was insisting that he tell the story of the patient as the patient understood it. This doctor was not interested whether a patient was schizophrenic or catatonic. He was interested in the narrative structure of this patient's life. So, armed with this, Coles went back out into the wards.

       But then a curious thing happened to him. When he asked patients to tell him their stories, guess what they said? "I won't tell you my story 'till you tell me yours." He had to descend to the level of the patient. He had to drop the pose that he was an observer watching the patients, classifying them, and labeling them with diagnoses that couldn't be argued with-diagnoses in which the task was to rebut everything the patient said. Coles would say something like "Tell me about the world in which you are living." Then the patient would say, "Tell me about what it means to live as a psychiatrist, and when I come to trust you-when I come to trust you because I think that you are going to be open and direct with me, that you are going to give me the real gods about yourself, I'll give you something of me."

       That's what he spent the rest of his life doing, telling stories and listening to stories-a reciprocal arrangement. Then, at some point, he said the great lesson is this: You have built a little story of your life that has gotten you in deep trouble. It's got no way out, and you are not so happy being there. I am going to show you another story. I am going to tell you another story about your life that will get you out. And get you some place better. Let me show you a better story that leads to a better life.

       Every group of people-patients, psychiatrists and journalists-all have a story of their lives. They "narrativize" their lives. Individuals do it-we were born here, have this sibling, that sibling, this parent, that parent, this community, this happened to me, that happened to me. We spend our lives writing this story. If you read a great poet like Philip Larkin, he says that's also what we do with our last breath-we revise the last line of our biography. From the moment we grasp language to the moment we die, it is the continuous  central human task to build and rebuild the story of our lives.

       The paradox is that we build the first story because of what happens to us as young people. My growing up in an Irish-Catholic family with five sisters in the working-class north end of Providence, a textile family, forms the fabric of my narrative understanding of myself. Then, at moments when that story started to get me in trouble-and it's gotten me in a bit of trouble now and again-I had to face again the fact that we keep telling ourselves these stories long after they are useful. Siblings have gone away. Parents are dead. Communities have disappeared. Occupations have changed. I'm a dean in a university, so far away from that life I can't find it with a telescope-and I'm still narrativizing my life through the terms laid out in those primordial discussions.

       The art of a great psychiatrist is to bring that story fully to our consciousness, and to say to ourselves, "Look at the difficulty you are getting into with that. Is this the way to do it? Let me show you another way."

       If you want to see an absolutely brilliant, autobiographical novel on this theme, it's Joanne Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which she wrote under the pen name of Hannah Green and which had a long run in the 1960s. She tells the story of her own mental illness and recovery, in pretty much those terms.

       Journalists have been telling themselves a story about themselves since the 1890s. A story that's a narrative of what a journalist is-where they begin, where they come from, what they do. Journalists make up this story on their own, but the place where it's most often told in this culture, strangely enough, is at the United States Supreme Court. Its most eloquent expressions are found in the opinions written by Justices Hugo Black and Louis D. Brandeis and others. Phrases that are dropped into sentences there - "the public's right to know," the adversary notion of the press, and on and on-became part of the daily rhetoric by which journalists say, "Yeah, this is what I'm doing."

       I happen to think that story-the story of the adversary press-has had a terrific run. It was very useful-perfectly well adapted to a set of circumstances that held from the turn of the century through the 1960s, maybe the 1970s. But, like a story of teenagers getting into trouble, we've got to get rid of it and tell a new story. We've got to cook up a new tale.

       It's not that the story of the adversary press is wrong, and not that it was bad, anymore than my life was wrong and bad. It was overadapted. I kept telling it when it had no purpose anymore, when everyone knew it. It couldn't convince me of anything new, and it couldn't solve any problem I was running into with my own wife, my own children in the changed circumstances of my life.

       So, the philosophical task for me-what  I've been trying to do, I suppose, for 25 years-is to try to find a different way of telling the story of journalism, from the time it started to now, that might offer some new set of hopes, expectations, explorations, and possibilities. Maybe even something more.

       I know that at the heart of it is taking seriously at least three aspects of that scene with Robert MacNeil and of borrowing from Robert Coles.

       MacNeil's expression is a frustration with the story of journalism- finding that it's not working so well, looking for something to replace it, and not having anything else. An inarticulate grunt, "It stinks," stands for a very deep well of dissatisfaction, and I daresay it's not limited to Mr. MacNeil.

       This philosophical talk involves-again, a la Robert Coles-not a new story nor an old story. Stories are neither old nor new-I don't know, is it even possible to tell a new story?

Alfred North Whitehead said everything of importance in the world has been said before by someone who didn't invent it. There are no new stories, no new practices-just old stories and old ways that are resurrected, recombined, and reenergized.

       This task takes the issue of the journalist as a storyteller very seriously and says, what does it mean to narrate the world?

       And, finally, it involves listening rather than waiting, to use a psychiatric description-being a listener rather than someone who engages in surveillance.

       One of the aspects of journalism that I think is troublesome-and it's not new-is the sense that the press, in playing its adversary role, became the agent or observer of the outside society. This has been deeply resented by the people whose lives journalists were peering into and reporting about, like a voyeur staring through a window. This is not new, either.

       One of the most famous lines used to justify modern journalism is the one that goes, the purpose of the press or the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. What has been forgotten is that this phrase was used in total irony by its inventor, Peter Finley Dunn, in a column in the 1890s, when he first started to observe this. I am dropping most of the Irish dialect in which Dunn had his characters speak.

       "Was ya ever in the papers?" asked Mr. Dooley.

       "Once," Mr. Hennessey said. "But it wasn't me, it was another Hennessey. Was you?"

       "Many times when I was prominent socially. You could hardly pick up a paper without seeing me name in it, any amount of time. You must lead a very simple life not to get in the newspapers."

       It goes on and on this way. Then he says, "The newspaper does everything for us. It runs the police force and the banks, commands the military, controls the legislature, baptizes the young, marries the foolish, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, buries the dead and roasts them afterwards. There aint anything it don't turn it's hand to, from explaining the doctrine of transubstantiation to composing saleratus biscuits. You can get any kind of information you want in your favorite paper, about yourself or anyone else. What the Czar whispered to the Emperor William when they are alone. How to make a silk hat out of wire mattress. How to settle the coal strike. Who to marry. How to get on with your wife when you're married. What to feed the baby. What doctor to go to. They used used to say a man's life was a closed book. So it is. But now it's an open newspaper.

       That was the first modern expression of journalism as an agent of surveillance in modern life-looking in on life as an outsider, watching it and reporting it, revealing it, digging it up, but somehow not quite connected to the rest of us-and certainly not to Hennessey and Dooley. This leads us back to the question that is the central question philosophically: What is journalism for? "For" in a dual sense-what is it good for? What is it useful for? And "for" in the sense of what does it represent? What does it stand for? What virtues does it manifest?

       If you want to folow this closely, you can follow the answers through alternative conceptions of the Constitution. There are two different versions of this: The press as an adversary and instrument of surveillance, and the press as an instrument of public life.

       It's funny when you read these court decisions. United States  v. New York Times

better known as the Pentagon Papers case-is the greatest single case we have, in which the court refused to stop publication of stories based on a secret Pentagon study of the Vietnam War. Hugo Black did his greatest writing in that case, defending the Times and the Washington Post  and congratulating them.  He justifies his defense by saying, "What else is a newspaper if it's not an adversary?" When he clinches his argument, he says, "Listen to the First Amendment!" Then he quotes it-except he doesn't quote the actual First Amendment. He quotes James Madison's draft of the First Amendment-very much different than the First Amendment and very much closer to the language of public life.

       It is quite clear Madison is not talking about the press as an institution. What he's saying is,  the First Amendment says that people are free to assemble. When they gather, they're free to express their thoughts without surveillance from the state or anyone else. Having expressed their thoughts in public, they're free to write them down. They're free to print them and mail them and distribute them as they will. If anyone tries to shut someone up because they're a Jew or a Catholic or any version of dissident Protestant, they can't be allowed to do that. Nothing to do with religion should bar people from public life. Every opinion must be considered independent of its roots in religion. There is no doctrine of separation of church and state in Madison's formulation.

       This is the first time anyone has declared that a public society is one in which you can exclude no groups. Of course, that didn't mean very much in a world that excluded women and banks and workers-a world that was pretty much limited in practice to bourgeois men, businessmen, and traders who gathered in the public places of Philadelphia. But it was the theoretical wedge that opened to the fuller meaning of the First Amendment-a meaning in which these things are not rights or privileges that people have. They are a Constitution. They constitute us, as a people, in a given way. They make us. They are the lived in virtues of life, not simply a matter of rights to be possessed and enforced through a legal mechanism.

       The understanding of this was to be found in Paris as much as in Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were more powerfully influenced by the French than the English. Robert Darnton, who has written several volumes about the history of the public in France during the 40 years prior to the French Revolution, tells a story that goes something like this.

       As the power of the French aristocracy waned in the face of a rising middle class, people started for the first time to gather in public places-and particularly in three public places. One was an outdoor area in the city known as the Tree of Cracow; the second was in salons; and the third, in taverns or coffee houses. There, they discussed Louis XVI, Louis XVI  and, above all, what was going on at court. Up until that time, it was a crime to even talk about what was happening-not only in the bedroom of Louis XIV, but in the court, which administered the society. Of course, the first reaction of the French was to form police that were somewhat different than today's-they were an administrative apparatus-to do what? To go to the Tree of Cracow, to go into the taverns, to go into the salons, so they could listen to what people said and then arrest them.

       A typical tale that Darnton tells is of someone repeating a story in a tavern. Another person comes up to him and says, "Oh, that's an interesting story! Let me think. I know a printer who would like to print that. They'll give you a contract, an advance." Outside they'd go, then-straight to the Bastille, for the publisher was an agent of the King. Then the person who was arrested was asked, "Who told that story to you?" And that person was arrested and asked the same question and so on, and so on. Chains of 10, 12 and 14 people were arrested as the police tried to pursue a story to its origins.

       Strangely enough, the people who talked at the Tree of Cracow-the first journalists, and maybe always-were often servants. Elegant people who wanted to know what was going on didn't want to go out themselves. So they sent their servants to find out what people were talking about. In the salons at night, the women who ran these great institutions sent people to the Tree of Cracow or to the taverns to report back. In the book at the entrance to the salon, people wrote down gossip on one side and news on the other. When that was printed, it was the first of the newspapers.

       So there were two kinds of news: nouvelle bouche, news out of the mouth, and nouvelle a la main, news out of the hand. Book forms of the news were reconstituted as books, pamphlets, and papers. The origin of Western journalism, then, was an act of delegitimizing the aristocracy and delegitimizing the king in the name of the construction of a democratic society. At the end of the French Revolution, St. Just defends the execution of the King by saying the principle by which the King must die is the principle by which society must live. The King shall die to the social contract-a ritual killing to a new principle.

       There is in our tradition no divorce between the origins of this activity in public life, among people, as an act of enhancing, defending and advancing forms of democratic life-and delegitimating undemocratic forms of authority. That, for me, is what is central to this mission, historically and until now. If you leave anything out of it-leave out any one of these equations-it becomes a less noble activity. If it is not deeply interconnected with -and I put it in metaphors-the salon, the tavern and the Tree of Cracow, it's the journalism of observation, not the journalism of public life.

       If journalism is not actively engaged in enhancing and forming a democratic public-in debate, disputation, arguments and, above all, things done outside of the realm of surveillance-it's at odds with its original purpose. If it is not willing to both defend democracy as the lived-in virtue that one is seeking, and to delegitimate authoritarian rule, it's not true to its original calling.

       Look at the Soviet Union, where journalists were much better off than people in this room are. They had summer homes. They traveled in limousines. Do you think I would rather have been the dean of the Moscow State University School of Journalism that the University of Illinois? You better believe I would have, if the question was where would I have had more influence or more power or more visibility or more wealth. Journalism flourishes as an economic practice and as a profession in authoritarian rule. It just doesn't flourish as the practice of virtuous life. It doesn't mean anything and, divorced from that intimate context, I believe it fails.

       I love a phrase, an Irish phrase some of you may know: "good craic," which is pronounce "crack." Good craic. It has a deliciously illicit feel to it, doesn't it ? But good craic is just good talk, a good time. And so the object of life is good craic-good talk and a good time, and that is best found in a conversable society.

       Because it's warm and late, I'm going to end on just one point related to that. This notion of the creation of a conversable society was at one time in our history so widespread it was the first chapter of some philosophy books. And so, just as I almost opened with David Hume, I'll end with him, and the Scottish Enlightenment.

       In an essay on essay writing, in which he describes his vocation, Hume says, "The elegant part of mankind who are not immersed in mere animal life, those of us who have the privilege of living life above mere brutal labor, these people who employ themselves in the operations of the mind, may be divided into two types: The learned and the conversable. The learned have chosen for their portion difficult operations of the mind which require leisure and solitude and cannot be brought to perfection without long preparation and severe labor. The conversable world, however, is a sociable disposition with a taste for pleasure, and an inclination for easier and gentle exercises of understanding. For reflections on human affairs and on the duties of a common life, and for the observations of the blemishes or perfections of the objects that surround us, such subjects do not furnish enough to live in solitude with them. These are subjects which require company, the conversation of our fellow creatures, to render them a real exercise of the mind. The separation of the learned from the conversable world was the great defect of the last age and the one we shall correct in this one. Learning has been a loser, shut up in colleges and cells, secluded from the world of good company. By that means, every part of what we call belle letters has become barbarous, cultivated by people without a taste for life, for manners, for liberty, for facility of thought and expression which can only be acquired by conversation. Philosophy went to wreck by this moping, recluse method of study, to become as chimerical in her conclusions as she was unintelligible in her style. I consider myself a resident and an ambassador from the dominions of learning to those of conversation and shall think it is my duty to promote a conversable life."

       Today, in an age when we celebrate the virtual reality of the internet, where the strangest human conversations go on-as barbarous as anything you've ever imagined-a virtual anticonversable world is now breaking out into a range war. It is as though we are on the old open plain of the West, taking sides between the ranchers who want it open for grazing and the farmers who want to fence it off to keep the sheep in and the crops growing. Now, this new range war will take a public good built with billions in tax dollars and turn it into a battleground for ownership, unfit for conversation and not promoted for it. Journalists are taking up residence there. We're now teaching courses on reporting in cyberspace.

       But as we do that, we'd better go back and think about the Tree of Cracow and the salon and the connection of journalism to the real world of real human beings and not the virtual world of virtual human beings.

       That, in some ways, is what I think it means to try to work out a way of living this life-the creation and promotion of what we now call social capital-the empowerment, the life of organization and conversation on which journalism depends. Journalists can report about the world, survey it, write stories of inert people doing nothing, every day waiting for the paper to show up or the television signal to reach them in order to know what to think now. But that is neither a world worthy of the virtues of journalism nor a world that satisfies the highest ambition of this craft.



Q: Could you tell us a little bit about what journalists' new story should be? What does the press need to be telling itself now that it hasn't been telling itself during the long run of the adversarial?



CAREY:  I learned a lot from one of the greatest figures I ever met, who died a few years back, Kenneth Burke. He spent his life writing a sentence that went, "Life is...." Then he filled in the blank. For all those years and in all of the 40 books he wrote, he kept trying to fill in the sentence, "Life is...." He tried everything, incidentally over the course of time. The best one, the happiest he had was this: "Life is a conversation. When you enter it, it's already going on. You try to catch the drift of it. You exit before it's over.

       That is the best single definition of human living I have ever encountered. We are born and all these bloody adults are talking. We stand around saying, what the hell are they talking about? And how can I get into the conversation? For many years they say, shut up and eat your peas! Then, finally you catch the drift of it and at some point you say, "Oh my God! When I die the conversation's going to be all over! It's going to end!" Then you realize people will pause for one moment and say, "Goodbye!" But the argument won't stop.

       So in some sense I try to do this. I start with, "Journalism is...." and I keep trying to write a better sentence.

       Journalism is...the conversation of our culture. It is a way of carrying....on a public conversation. The journalists that I admire are the ones who say, in some way, what journalist David Broder loves to say: "This is the best we could do in figuring out what the hell was going on today-here it is! What do you think about it? Do you have a better idea?" And do you know what they do then? They listen. They just don't wait for the letter to the editor that they can knock down and say, "Oh my God! the dumb public!"  They don't wait like the psychiatrist trying to ambush the patient. They listen. And they say, "I wonder if those people know something I don't-if they might tell it better, help me understand it better."

       With that understanding, we can reconstitute the conditions of the discourse. Partly that's a matter of style, a matter of writing. And partly that's a matter of being open. I mean, the most depressing thing about the Freedom Forum thing this weekend was that, by day two, it was nothing but an exercise in how dumb human beings are not to understand all this. Robert MacNeil's painful story had become the "dumb public" story-and if only they were smarter, of course they'd want to talk to us. If only they were smarter, they'd recognize we have the answers.

       But in fact, it is just the opposite. Democratic life is a form of conversation, and we must try to reconstitute our work stylistically, attitudinally, philosophically. That requires us to return to the root, not romantic, meaning of the word community, which is "the common life." We must return to the knowledge that the common life is an intelligent life.

       I want to recommend a little column to you. Robert Sipolsky writes a column in a magazine called The Sciences, published by the New York Academy of Sciences. He's a biologist at one of the universities here. One is devoted to going around the world finding out how common people understood science before scientists understood it --sotheing that is experimentally called ethnoscience, ethnochemistry. Think of how many drugs were created before people knew chemistry. How much rich tradition, knowledge, is embedded in the world itself, awaiting its own discovery?



Q: When you started talking about the psychiatrist listening to the patients' dysfunctional stories and giving them a different story, I thought you were going to have the press not in the role of the dysfunctional person but as the psychiatrist talking to the country. And so, what different story would we be telling if you think of the press as Robert Coles as opposed to the troubled patient?



CAREY: Well, the title of this conference over the weekend was "Media Power at Century's End: News, Money, Technology," and it was largely about money and technology. There wasn't too much about that term "news"--it kind of hung in there without much attention. But what was interesting was that the journalists who were there were saying, in our lifetime we have become very powerful. We shouldn't let anyone know about it, because we're a little embarassed about having that power. But if the choices are to be powerful or powerless, let's be powerful.

       I think in some sense that's the choice that's been made by journalists; that is, the model of the adversary and everything that that involves-being better informed, knowing things that others don't know, always having better facts, better data, better insight. There is a tendency to believe the worst about public figures and the worst about other people. We have a kind of consistently low-life interpretation of things-and we're committed to it. We essentially clobber any other interpretation as being hopelessly naive or idealistic. We susbstitute one story for another--not in a conversable way of saying we think we've got a better understanding of it, would you argue with us about this and see if we are right? But as a way of exercising power in forming a public narrative independent of what people are saying, might say, could say, if they were more empowered to say it.

       But what would a journalist be and do if they saw themselves not as someone who informed others or knew more than others--which are both very risky assumptions---but as just someone else who had a voice, one voice in a conversation of many. If there are not a lot of people talking, if you're talking by yourself and are no longer engaged in a conversation---and don't believe it's because the people out there believe you, trust you, find you credible, accede to your power. They're more likely to be saying, "The hell with them all. If this is the way the game is going to be played, I'm going to go off in pursuit of private pleasures. I will concentrate on those parts of life I can control rather than play a game in which I don't have a real role." I think that's the way the relationship is going.



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