Journalism and Modernism

Journalism and Modernism is a Cognitive Science class taught by James Miller.

Course Description
Since about the 1920s, mainstream journalism, the kind associated with serious newspapers, has aspired to be a science, or at least to adapt scientific practices and principles to reporting the news. News of this sort aims to be objective, fact-based and reliably accurate. Journalists employ standard practices in making the news, they behave according to ethical codes and, most of all, they present the news in conventionalized forms, like the breaking news story. News language is impersonal and sounds authoritative. All this regularity may be ?scientific,? but it also something else: culturally modernist. In this course, we will explore the novel idea that mainstream journalism is best understood as an example of ?high modernism.? We will draw especially on the theory and criticism of modernist architecture to provide our analytical vocabulary. Working as a research seminar, students will pursue their own semester-long projects, guiding our discussions and discovering literatures.