Uma interessante reflexão sobre jornalismo por Jay Rosen, no Press Think: The amendment says that people are free to gather together without the intrusion of the state or its representatives. Once gathered, they are free to speak to one another openly and freely. They are further free to write down what they have to say and to share it beyond the immediate place of utterance. For the people to write down what they say and share it. From this right that belongs to all citizens, Carey derives both the original meaning of press freedom, and the most urgent purpose of journalism-- to amplify, clarify and extend what the rest of us produce as a "society of conversationalists." Public conversation is not the pundits or professionals we see on talk shows. It is "ours to conduct," as Carey puts it. The press should help us out. Here emerges his different faith. For when "the press sees its role as limited to informing whomever happens to turn up at the end of the communication channel, it explicitly abandons its role as an agency for carrying on the conversation of the culture." How many journalists would say that their most basic task is to "inform" the public? Most, I think. Carey denies it: people inform themselves, he says. Yes, they need reliable news. But news should keep the conversation going among them. How many journalists believe that their profession, journalism, is the "only one mentioned in the Constitution?" Carey denies it. What is mentioned, he says, is the people's right to publish what they discover and think. Press freedom the way the press promotes it derives from that larger right. In Carey's world the religion of the press is properly rooted in the public: "The god term of journalism--the be-all and end-all, the term without which the enterprise fails to make sense, is the public. Insofar as journalism is grounded, it is grounded in the public." If they, the journalists, are supposed to believe in "us," the public, then do we, the public, have to believe in the press? That seems to me a puzzle involving in the last analysis faith.