I did not have the time to prepare a post while teaching with Daniel Dayan “Media and News in a Time of Crisis” in Wroclaw, Poland. This was unfortunate because there were news events during the period of the course that seemed to be a series of case studies on our topic. As we were examining theoretical material, which illuminates the roles media play in such cases, media were playing important roles, from the Murdoch scandal, to the terrorist attack in Oslo. Today, I will reflect on Murdoch and, more broadly, the tasks of making distinctions and coming to actionable judgments in the media. Oslo will wait for another day. I draw on the ideas of Eviatar Zerubavel, a distinguished sociologist of cognition and student of Erving Goffman, to make sense of our ongoing seminar discussion and the debate between Daniel and me.

The Murdoch presence in America has long concerned me, particularly Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. While Fox is a strange mix of opinionated journalism and political mobilization instrument, as I have already examined here in an earlier post, the Journal has been a distinguished business newspaper with a conservative slant on the news, with the slant increasingly prevailing over the news in recent years with Murdoch’s ownership. I was struck by Joe Nocerra’s analysis in The New York Times. Concern with factual reality has diminished. Editors went beyond improving reporter’s copy from the stylistic point of view to ideological “improvement.” Political and business news reported was re-worked to confirm the political positions promoted on the editorial page. Note the problem in these cases is that strong distinctions between journalism as a vocation and other vocations are ignored became fuzzy, in the terms of Zerubavel.

Such willful ignorance is also present in The New York Post, another Murdoch enterprise that I see in my daily life. I read it only late at night, picking up a discarded copy on the train when I have nothing else to stimulate my eyes and pass the time. It is a tabloid, with very limited news value, a kissing cousin of The News of the World. The scandal of that scandal sheet broke out with the hacking of a murdered teenager’s phone which has rocked British public life, suggesting that Murdoch’s international media empire may very well melt into air, challenging the standing of many British public figures, including Prime Minister Cameron. An unserious business has become very serious, though it is not directly connected with my concerns about Fox and the WSJ. Yet, I see an important indirect connection, which is related to one of the central themes of our seminar, the relationship between media and public and private life.

Daniel Dayan and I agree on the importance of making a strong distinction between public and private. Thus, for example, he and I were both highly critical in Deliberately Considered posts of the WikiLeaks dump, as was Elzbieta Matynia, a fellow teacher in our Democracy and Diversity Institute, and its director and organizer. This is not only a matter of political commitment, for the pubic good and private happiness, as Hannah Arendt illuminates in The Human Condition. It also is based on an understanding of a fundamental precondition of  almost all social endeavors, nicely explained by Erving Goffman in his investigations of the front stage and back stage of interaction. If diplomacy is understood as an alternative to war in international relations, revealing secrets must be revealed selectively, with specific critical issues in mind, not just “dumped.” To dump is to destroy. It is a nihilistic act, undermining the world of diplomacy, potentially making war more likely. In the terms of Eviatar Zerubavel, our minds are rigid on this matter.

While this is an important ground of agreement, Dayan and I disagree on how the distinction between public and private is applied in the media in specific circumstances. Our minds are flexible in Zerubavel’s terms, but in different ways.

In the Strauss-Kahn scandal, he worries about the compromise of the private life of a public official. He emphasizes the principle of innocent until proven guilty, and thinks the French press has compromised this principle. The invasion of the private life of public officials for my friend and colleague is a pressing concern.

I worry that the public standing of officials has enabled private abuses, and that hidden in the shadows, the high status of powerful men has supported a sexist public life. I think that the failure of the French press to report on “what everyone knew” about DSK may have compromised the private rights of some women, and has compromised the principle of equality in French public affairs. using public status to abuse people privately is no less serious than the invasion of the private life of public officials. The unfolding scandal in France has the potential for working against this. Thus, I think the struggle to respect the separation of the public and the private goes both ways.

Yet, I admit this presents significant problems, radically revealed by Murdoch and Company. Their aggressive lack of respect for the privacy of public officials, specifically “the royals” and various celebrities, was widely known and tolerated. It was on the profits generated by such journalism that Mr. Murdoch became a king maker in British political life, courted by both the Conservative and Labor Parties. But when Murdoch employees ignored the distinction between public and private in the hacking of a young murder victim, and perhaps even of the families of the victims of 9/11 terrorists, “unintentional public figures,” the media empire built on invasive journalism that ignored the public – private distinction almost as a matter of principle, began its collapse. Please note: I judge, and also hope, that Murdoch is finished. I believe those who saw the Mubarak analogy are correct.

This would present an opportunity to reassert journalistic standards that are clearly in retreat, applying not only to the necessary distinction between private and public, but also the distinction between news and opinion, revealed in The Wall Street Journal, and the distinction between news reporting and political mobilizing, pioneered on television by Fox News.

Dayan and I also disagree on the distinction between journalism and politics as it applies to Fox News. He thinks that Fox (and I imagine would think the same of the WSJ) is presenting a political position, as is inevitably the case. I think that important distinctions between the ethics of different related activities are being blurred. Here I am more rigid, he more fuzzy, reversing our positions on DSK.

Making distinctions in everyday practice is difficult and not straightforward, as Zerubavel demonstrates in his masterful book, The Fine Line.  He analyzes “the rigid mind” that insists upon clear and strongly enforced distinctions, the “fuzzy mind” that does not perceive or blurs socially constructed distinctions, and the “flexible mind” with elastic mental structures “which allow us to break away from the mental cages in which we so often lock ourselves, yet still avoid chaos.”  In these terms, Dayan and I agree that the media have become too fuzzy.  But I think his answer is rigid on Strauss-Kahn, too fuzzy on Fox and The Wall Street Journal. He, no doubt reverses my judgment. Our disagreements underscore that now is the time for an agile flexibility. We disagree with mutual respect in our seminar and personal discussions, revealing that the truth that lies between us. I think we agree that the same sort of interaction is the micro- infrastructure of democratic life.

As I reported last week, Daniel Dayan and I had a nice lunch in Paris on the terrace of a little restaurant at the Palais Royal. He ate blood sausage. My wife, Naomi, and I had couscous with chicken. I followed Daniel’s recommendation and ordered mine with olives, a dish that was his grandmother’s specialty back in Morocco. We discussed what proved to be the theme of last week, looking at North Africa and the Middle East from the point of view of Europe. But of course, we couldn’t and didn’t ignore the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, then raging in Paris. The following evening, he extended his side of the conversation in a crisp essay, which we posted on Monday. Here I continue my side of the conversation.

My first response came in the form of an email I wrote him upon receiving his piece:

I don’t agree with you on all points, centered on two issues: the way the distinction between private and public moves (the most general issue), and how the presumption of innocence necessarily varies from one institutional sphere to the next, from the judiciary to the police to the press, for example. Consider the case of a child molester and how the presumption is enacted or not by different people placed differently in the society. This is an empirical and normative issue. More soon. Again it was great seeing you and great receiving the post.

In the case of a child molester, the police look for a suspect and attempt to confirm guilt, while in court there must be a presumption of innocence. Before, during and after a trial, the press and the general public judges, independently of formal legalities, and explores whether they think justice is done by the police and the courts, sometimes in a sensational way. The spheres of public activity and the press are different from the professional activities of the police and the courts. And quite clearly, when the issue is child molestation, the public and the press are predisposed, often without regard to the solidity of the evidence, to believe the police, given the nature of the crime and the revulsion it elicits. They presume guilt.

Nonetheless with other sorts of offenses, ones concerning political or moral position, this often is not the case. In the U.S., Democrats probably presume Republican rascals are guilty, while Republicans presume the guilt of Democratic rascals. Partisanship colors perception, no doubt and this sort of partisan perception certainly was going on in the DSK affair.

Dayan worries, understandably, that the spectacle of guilt and dislodging of the powerful may overwhelm justice. He takes this to be the point of the philosopher and former minister Luc Ferry’s media performance, during which he denounced the press’ failure to report an unnamed former minister’s pedophilia in Morocco at an unspecified time. So outrageous was the performance that Dayan speculates it must have been “a demonstration by a philosopher of the way the media routinely takes short-cuts and obstructs the process of justice.”

Dayan believes that the French media have been perniciously operating, presuming guilt instead of innocence in the DSK affair. Further, he believes that the critical self-reflection in the French media about their failure to report Strauss-Kahn’s past transgressions overlooks the necessity of drawing a strong distinction between public and private matters. This is where my dear friend and I have a fundamental theoretical disagreement.

To use the theory of Eviatar Zerubavel, while Dayan believes that there needs to be a clear and strong distinction between public and private concerns, I believe the distinction is fuzzy and that it’s good that it is. However, we agree that the distinction between public and private has to be drawn. Thus Daniel (WikiLeaks and the Politics of Gestures and Political Leadership and Hostile Visibility) and I (WikiLeaks Front Stage/Back Stage) fundamentally agree that WikiLeaks’ general release of secret diplomatic exchanges potentially undermined diplomacy, which is one of the fundamental alternatives to war in international relations. It is not the specific revelations that concern me. It is the general principle that openness is more desirable than secrecy. Sometimes secrets are necessary in order to get on with proper private and public concerns, e.g. both love and the alternatives to war. When some things are shown, they disappear. As Hannah Arendt explored in The Human Condition, when love is openly and publicly displayed, it is no longer intimate, no longer love.

But surely, this disappearance is not always a loss. Public inspection makes it clear when romance, seduction, and eroticism end and sexual aggression and even rape begin. Now in France people are reporting they knew or at least suspected, for a long time, with considerable evidence, that Strauss-Kahn was not a womanizer but a sexual predator. Media attention to such matters would have made that clear. Reporting on such matters may have been indiscreet. But in this case indiscretion would have been a public virtue. The sexual peccadilloes of public figures shouldn’t matter, until they should, and the media clumsily should work with this. More on this next week, with reflections on the foolishness of Anthony Weiner.

A final note on the Week in Review: In the past months I have used the Week in Review to show how the various posts at DC during the week relate and highlight an important public issue or theoretical point. I will continue to occasionally make such posts. But I will also use the platform, as I did today, to engage a specific post, or to address an issue that occurred in the past week that we have not addressed here. That said, in the posts this week, we saw how the elections in Peru show how institutionalized democracy matters. Memorial tattoos show how marked skins beyond the workings of official institutions preserve memory for and of those involved in war, and as Alissa’s moving reply to the post demonstrates, they can also inspire the reflections of those beyond the immediately involved. Of course, this depends on the mediation of the photographer, Mary Beth Heffernan, and the report and reflections of the sociologist, Michael Corey. What we do to make the world a bit more tolerable for a small circle can have large effects beyond our circle, as Vince Carducci’s review of Grace Lee Boggs’ latest book reveals. For more on that theme take a look at the video of Immanuel Wallerstein and Grace Lee Boggs in conversation at the 2010 US Social Forum embedded in the post.