Mainstream Journalism as Anti-Vernacular Modernism

The on-going collapse of mainstream American journalism has occasioned attempts to salvage it, with the explanation that democracy is at risk when “serious”, “socially responsible” journalism is absent. This paper, taking Daniel Hallin's cue, argues that mainstream journalism's dramatic rise and fall, largely a post-war phenomenon, can be significantly explained as an instance of cultural modernism. Drawing on concepts from modernist architecture, the paper shows how journalism's high-modernist aspirations pitted it against the persistent, vernacular journalism of tabloid news, involving features of design, discourse and practice, and why they can be understood, not as a successfully achieved scientific journalism, but as the passing modernist moment in the continuing contestation about the nature of news and news reporting.