AUTHENTICATING THE POLITICAL How the news media redefine their social relevance

Innovative media forums like Pastor Rick Warren's 2008 interviews with the major party nominees challenge US journalism's institutional authority to mediate public political discourse. Journalists reacted to Warren's forum by re-envisioning their institutional authority as authenticating the political. Others might have public conversations with politicians, but only journalism rendered such conversations political, that is, suitable for democratic decision-making. Claiming journalism's prerogative to generate authentically political discourse, they transformed the forum into news. They positioned it as mere preview to the more traditionally journalistic forum of the presidential debates, transformed forum discourse grounded in evangelical concepts of testimony and redemption into a news discourse of strategy and hypocrisy, and situated themselves as necessary mediators helping citizens discern what was truly political about Warren's forum. Although journalists could not avoid Warren's public criticism of their specific practices, their claims of institutional authority to define political discourse and to discipline and rehabilitate discourse that did not meet the standard were not contested.