The Rocky Road to New Paradigms

Modernizing News and Citizenship Standards

Bibliographic Data

ID6334869
AuthorsDoris A Graber, Doris Α Graber (University of Illinois Chicago, corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume20
Issue2
Pages145-148
Publication date2003-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Communication (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1058-4609 • E-ISSN: 1091-7675
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10584600390211163
OpenAlexW2082581339
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited1

There was a time when nearly everybody who was anybody among Western cognoscenti knew that the world was flat. All the maps showed it, the scientists confirmed it, and the church preached it. Anyone who nonetheless proposed sailing westward from Europe to reach India found himself without resources to undertake a voyage expected to lead to a disastrous drop off the edge of the flat earth. Anyone daring to even question the established paradigm about the shape of the world risked excommunication from the church and eternal damnation. Came Christopher Columbus! He was able to convince the Queen of Spain that testing the accuracy of prevailing geography paradigms was worth modest funding for ships and crews. The rest is history, familiar to all of us. Columbus’ trip proved that the earth is round. Still, it took a very long time before the scholarly community, the church, and the proverbial men in the street were willing and psychologically able to tolerate, accept, and finally embrace the paradigm switch. John Zaller is no Christopher Columbus. In fact, to carry out the analogy, he is probably more like some of the early converts who embraced the new, empirically grounded, round-earth paradigm ahead of the crowd. “A New Standard of News Quality: Burglar Alarms for the Monitorial Citizen” puts Zaller squarely into a small camp of iconoclastic scholars. These scholars have been laboring to bury the unsustainable belief that democracy requires citizens who fully understand all major policy issues and a press that supplies them with all of the necessary information. As a long-time member of the iconoclast group, I welcome John Zaller with open arms. I share his belief that American democracy can thrive even though American citizens (and citizens in other Western democracies as well) cannot and will not be held to the standards of the “Informed Citizen,” as Michael Schudson (1998) describes the breed. Full knowledge about all major political issues has become impossible. There is simply too much to know and most of it is extraordinarily complex, requiring technical, managerial, and political expertise beyond the reach of most citizens. I agree with Zaller and like-minded scholars that good citizenship in the 21st century requires a new paradigm and that the “Monitorial Citizen” serves the purpose quite well. That paradigm takes into account that most citizens lead complex lives in which civic duties are one of many pressing claims for each person’s attention. Given the strain on most citizens’ attention resources, it is also clear that the database that citizens

Citizenship · Damnation · Democracy · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · History · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Philosophy

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