Foreclosing Deliberation

This study examines how journalists responded to intellectual dissent from prevailing understandings of the 9/11 attacks in a controversy surrounding an essay by Professor Ward Churchill. By triangulating textual analysis with interviews of Colorado newspaper journalists, we explore how reporters and editors made sense of their participation in a foreclosing of deliberation. The findings suggest that paradigm repair is not sufficient as a framework for how professionals perceive their work when news construction conforms to hegemonic logic. We introduce the concept of professional realism, whereby journalists lower expectations for themselves as participants in a marketplace of ideas. Professional realism is less about repair of normative journalism than a retreat from deliberative principles and a defense of news practices that reaffirm cultural boundaries of political dissent. We nonetheless document ambivalence and regret in journalists' evaluation of their work, along with a kind of backstage, personal resistance to anti-deliberative practice.