The Interpretive Community and Reform: Public Journalism Plays Out in North Carolina

Abstract

This article is an analysis of news reports and opinion pieces written about the news consortium that covered the 1996 senatorial and state governor races in North Carolina. The author argues that although critics and supporters of the consortium disagreed about whether it resulted in good or bad journalism, they agreed on a more fundamental understanding as to how a free press works in a modern democracy. The analysis suggests that an overreliance on traditional models of both journalism and communication more generally caused confusion in the North Carolina case among public journalism's defenders. If the assumptions of communication inherent in these models remain unexamined, the changes that public journalism reforms produce within the American journalistic community will probably be quite limited.

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