Abstract
Current Australian academic and previously Walkley-award winning broadcast journalist Chris Nash has produced a book that challenges the orthodoxy of journalism studies and argues that journalism has transitioned to a methodologically self-aware, critically reflective practice in the production of knowledge.
Nash takes some of the key defining aspects of journalism that are also regarded as flaws by critics in the academy – the focus on verifiable truth, empiricism and ‘news sense’ situated in the present in terms of both time and space – and treats these as methodological challenges. Drawing on the conceptual frameworks of Pierre Bourdieu, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Gaye Tuchman, he explores the ways in which rigorous journalism practice can be theorised to meet these challenges.
While he acknowledges that both the common sense and scholarly views largely agree that journalism is a ‘non-theoretical craft’, Nash has used the works of two New York-based men to explore his arguments that journalism can move beyond the strictures of a profession or craft to stand as an equal in the humanities and social sciences with art and history.
He uses selective works of German-American conceptual artist Hans Haacke and two books written by journalist I.F. Stone to argue that an epistemological rupture is overdue in journalism studies – that Haacke’s works were journalism as they were rejected as art by Guggenheim Museum Director Thomas Messer in 1971 and that Stone’s books The Hidden History of the Korean War 1950–51, published in 1952, and The Trial of Socrates (1988) were journalism rather than works of history. It is worth exploring these very selective works to understand Nash’s argument more clearly.
In 1971, three works to form part of Hans Haacke’s planned one-person exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York were regarded by museum director Thomas Messer as journalism and not art; at the time, he described them as, therefore, ‘lower than commercial art’. Two of these incorporated black and white photographs in a flat style of New York tenement buildings supplemented by publicly available information from the local titles office including street maps, address, ownership, basic building description, most recent land transfer and mortgage status. While the proposed exhibition’s curator regarded these works as important in the development of modern art, Nash has used them as a vehicle for discussing issues for journalism as a scholarly research practice. The modern discipline of art history has very firmly placed these works in the development of modern art, and Haacke also subsequently had a successful international career as an artist with these rejected works hung in subsequent art exhibitions.
Nash presents Stone’s works, both derived from documents and reports of the times, are journalism in clear agreement with Stone who was shunned as a journalist after the publication of the first book. Stone argued that in both cases, one work about contemporary events in Korea and the other set in ancient Greece, he was not present, and hence, his sources were documents and evidence supplied by other. In particular, with The Trial of Socrates, Stone asked how does a reporter cover a trial held 2400 years ago?
Nash, while admitting that he has confined his examples to a very small sample, has nevertheless provided thought-provoking and counter-orthodox arguments that journalism has transitioned to a methodologically self-aware, critically reflective practice in the production of knowledge. What is ultimately unanswered in this approach are the views of practising professional journalists.