The Real and the Right: Journalistic Authority and the Coverage of Judith Miller

Abstract

Though journalists openly embrace the “information ideal” and derive authority from the strategies associated with objectivity, they simultaneously employ the “story ideal” and derive authority from the moral force that underlies narrative. This paper uses moments of legal incoherence in the coverage of the jailing of Judith Miller as an opportunity to explore the relationship between objective and narrative authority in journalism. It concludes that these two sources of authority work together to make journalistic accounts appear real both as direct transcriptions of reality and as reflections of a properly ordered moral universe.