ABSTRACT
Journalism, as Lord Northcliffe has once noted, is a ‘profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand’. Northcliffe’s statement is probably excessively vitriolic, especially when compared to the accepted wisdom (Gans, 2003; Maier, 2005; Miller, 2009). However, it is directed at one of journalists’ main weaknesses as mediators of information: limited expertise in the subject matter of coverage. In what follows we argue that the current crisis of the Western media is also a crisis of journalistic expertise in the subject matter of the news they cover. Moreover, even if journalistic expertise remained constant in a post-industrial society characterized by growing complexity, it would still leave journalists in a state of relative knowledge-inferiority. This chapter invites scholars, journalists and journalism educators to rethink journalistic expertise. Such rethinking may prove valuable because of the significance of journalistic expertise for democracy and public knowledge, and because the crisis avails an opportunity to see in a new light the past idealizations and the nostalgic reminiscences about a ‘golden age’ of journalistic expertise.
