The wall becomes a curtain

Abstract

This chapter is an effort to explicate journalists' rhetoric, exploring the strategies that journalists and media critics have taken to reinforce this boundary. The erosion of this boundary is not necessarily something to be mourned. For decades, it has provided a means for journalists to avoid knowledge of and moral responsibility for the creeping co-optation of their work by commercial interests. It has also left them ill-prepared for an online-oriented media environment in which their work is increasingly vulnerable to the fluctuations of market forces. But the wall has also carried significant practical consequences in giving journalists a symbolic image to remind them of their own role in maintaining a professional practice that fundamentally serves democratic aims rather than commercial ones. As the wall declines in professional importance, it is imperative that journalists develop and defend a less fraught and more robust set of norms that safeguard the profession's integrity and autonomy amid powerful commercial forces.

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