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The Sacred Side of Professional Journalism 157

eighteenth-century enlightenment period in Europe, media gradually have
replaced religion as the dominant institutions in western society’. Gans (1980:
293) acknowledges the analogy with religion but warns against taking it without
‘a large grain of salt’. Dayan and Katz (1992: 7) speak of ‘the reverence and
ceremony’ associated with media events and ‘the almost priestly role played by
journalists’ on particular occasions. There is also a long-standing debate about
professionalism in the mass media (Beam, 1988; Dennis, 1989; Goldstein, 1985;
Olen, 1988; Schudson, 1988; Smith, 1980). However, the tie between sacredness
and professionalism in mass communication has received little attention. For the
sake of simplicity, I now focus exclusively on the mass media in their capacity as
sources of news, political and otherwise. I should also concede at this point that
my argument is primarily aimed at ‘quality’ newspapers and other media with
public service pretensions.
Information about events that occur beyond the sphere of personal experience
is clearly valuable to ordinary persons in industrial democracies. In sharp con-
trast, individuals and societies in former, pre-industrial, predemocratic, times
could manage without information about events that occurred beyond their
immediate existence. In other words, what they could not experience by means
of their own senses or gather through local gossip was of little more than curiosity
value. This was so for two reasons: first, simple societies are self-sufficient to
a high degree and do not depend on other societies for their subsistence; and
second, those events in far-away places which might affect them were so com-
pletely outside their control that it mattered very little whether they received
advance news or not.
All this changed in the wake of the Age of Discovery and the Industrial
Revolution. In modern times self-sufficiency is virtually unattainable for any one
society. Any spot on earth may be immediately affected by an economic, politi-
cal or military decision taken by a state on the other side of the globe. Hence, the
relevance of events to a particular nation is no longer inversely related to their
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distance from that nation. Add to this the basic assumption of democracy that
every member of society should carry his or her share of the responsibility for
political decisions and we are bound to conclude that news belongs to ‘human
problems amenable to expert service’ (Abbott, 1988: 35). Without news we could
neither exercise our political rights nor fulfil our political obligations (Thurén,
1989). In this sense the modern journalist resembles the priest of former times
who held the key to our salvation. Thus, I think it is well established that news-
gatherers and newscasters ‘serve the vital needs of man’. But are we getting
‘expert service’ from the news media? The answer is affirmative in terms of spe-
cial skills (technical or practical), but a ‘definable body of knowledge’ possessed
by newspeople probably does not exist. Indeed, journalism is considered by
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some to be typical of occupations that ‘seem to be less suitable to professional-
ization than others ... because the knowledge they require is not easily expressed
and transmitted in theoretical form’ (Kocka, 1990: 69). Although a growing pro-
portion of newspeople are graduates of schools of journalism or similar institu-
tions, a 1984 report (echoing, as it might seem, the lamentations of 19th-century
critics of medicine) concluded that ‘the general state of journalism and mass
communication education is dismal’ (quoted by Goldstein, 1985: 162). Mass