Michael Lissack to objectively verifiable statements. We make whatever kinds of statements we think necessary to convey our experience as we understand it. Some of those statements may be objective and factual in nature. Others may not be. Often the facts are unclear or their significance is ambiguous, and in such cases we switch voices, as it were, drop any pretense to objectivity, and start talking about the uncertainties and ambiguities or broader meanings we're aware of, regardless of whether this means slipping out of our repor- torial voice. In other words, we take responsibility for our meaning and (if any) our irony. If we come to a situation in which we can't be sure the reader will have the information he needs to decode and construe our ironies, we provide those cues. Stepping out of the ironic pose, we do what it takes to commu- nicate experience and meaning successfully. The news story can't or won't do this. It stays in its objective voice even when that becomes counterpro- ductive from the point of view of successfully conveying information and understanding to the reader. One could say that the news form is so rigid, and the news organization using and defining it so bureaucratized, that working journalists are denied the expository flexibility they need to insure that the meaning of the news story doesn't get out of sync with what they observed of and understood about the event. One could say that the working journalist is so desensi- tized to his intellectual responsibility to the reader, or so sensitized to the intellectual demands being made by the newsmaker, that he or she willingly tolerates a substantial discrepancy between what the story means and what actually took place as he or she understood it. Or one could say that the news organization is so intensely focused on the advertising sales-supporting effort to turn out a news product giving readers the impression that the whole world is watching, and so comparatively indifferent to the reader satisfaction-supporting effort to give its own best understanding of the event at hand, that it willingly sacrifices the latter to the former. However one puts it, newsmakers know that the news story can almost always be counted on to stay in its ironically objective voice, and they ag- gressively take advantage of this fact. The news genre's refusal to shift voices
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