Page 143 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

132 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

immigrants). On this score, the statistics are bad enough. According to a
1979 poll, only 30 per cent of Americans responding could identify the
two countries involved in the SALT II talks then in progress; in 1982,
only 30 per cent knew that Ronald Reagan opposed the peace
movement’s nuclear freeze proposal; in 1985, 36 per cent thought that
28
either China, India or Monaco was part of the Soviet Union. But
ignorance is sometimes—not always—a defense against powerlessness.
Why bother knowing if there’s nothing you know how to do about what
you know? Why get worked up? Again, the promotion of ignorance
coincides with the emptying out of the public sphere—the paucity of
forms through which political energies could be mobilized. In the end,
what is most disturbing is not ignorance in its own right, but, rather, the
coupling of ignorance and power. When the nation-state has the power
to reach out and blow up cities on the other side of the world, the spirit
of diversion seems, to say the least, inadequate to the approaching
millennium. Neither know-it-alls nor know-nothings are likely to rise to
the occasion.
I wish to thank Jon D.Cruz, John Jacobs, David Riesman, Jay Rosen,
Ruth Rosen, Cynthia Samuels and Michael Schudson for their
comments on earlier drafts.

NOTES

1 Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan
Presidency, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988, pp. 268–9.
2 Hedrick Smith, The Power Game: How Washington Works, New York:
Random House, 1988, pp. 412–14.
3 Transcript, ABC Viewpoint, Nov. 8, 1988.
4 Smith, op. cit., p. 418.
5 David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely
Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, abridged edn, New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961, pp. 181–2.
6 Mark Crispin Miller, Boxed In: The Culture of TV, Evanston, 111:
Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 3.
7 Mark Crispin Miller, ‘Deride and conquer’, in Todd Gitlin (ed.),
Watching Television, New York: Pantheon, 1987, pp. 187–8.
8 Ronald Lembo, ‘The symbolic uses of television: social power and the
culture of reception’, PhD dissertation, University of California,
Berkeley, Department of Sociology, 1989, pp. 226–30.
9 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the
American Frontier, 1600–1860, Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University
Press, 1973, pp. 94–145. Slotkin writes (p. 95): ‘The captivity narratives