## Victor Pickard: Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society.

Oxford University Press, 2020, 255 pp.

## MARTIN EIDE

University of Bergen

Victor Pickard has written a comprehensive, nuanced, and fascinating book on the crisis of American journalism. The Annenberg scholar provides a sharp and important analysis based on historical and sociological perspectives. Victor Pickard uncover the roots of the crisis, in order to reinvent journalism.

The underlying problem is a toxic commercialism that prioritizes profit  over  democratic  imperatives  and,  consequently,  degrades journalism. Pickard envisions a way out, based on a need for a publicly owned and democratically governed media system. With scholars like Robert McChesney and John Nichols, Victor Pickard argues that this social democratic approach is as American as apple pie!

In Democracy Without Journalism? Victor Pickard launches three competing narratives about journalism and the election of Trump. First:  news  media  enabled  Trump's  ascendance  through  a  horserace  coverage.  Second:  a  newfound  appreciation  for  the  Fourth Estate. Third: the needed public service was precisely the journalism that failed.

Pickard's analysis has a strong historical and political economical basis, including normative aspects, in providing a rigorous account of social agents in power. Among Pickard's illuminating formulations is the following: Journalism should provide the nation's early warn- ing system, 'so problems can be anticipated, studied, and debated and addressed before they grow to crisis proportions' .

The book locates different failures in the US media system to confront 'the misinformation society' , in which 'Fake News' plays a central role. However, Victor Pickard finds the concept to be 'a deeply problematic term' . Unfortunately, he doesn't have much more to say about 'Fake News' and its relationship to Pickard's preferred phrase

- the misinformation society.

A  strength  with  Pickard's  approach  is  his  focus  on  journalism's deinstitutionalization  and  how  media  figure  within  larger  power nities. It allows us to reimage what journalism could be, and brings

relationships. This position also provides journalism with opportuinto focus journalism's normative foundation.

Pickard's proposal is to regard journalism as a public good. His new book is a great resource in confronting 'the misinformation society' and  offering  an  investigation  of  the  infrastructure  of  democracy. Pickard's contribution is helpful in an important endeavor to reimage journalism. 'For too long, US society has held the wrong debate over what new business model might support journalism,' Pickard argues.  His  proposal  is  to  'clarify  the  structural  roots  of  the  crisis, expand the political imagery for potential futures, identify alternatives, and help chart a path toward actualizing them. ' Pickard's well written book will set us straight.

## MARTIN EIDE

Professor

Dept. of Information Science and Media Studies University of Bergen martin.eide@uib.no

DOI: 10.7146/journalistica.v15i1.129152