James W. Carey, 1989

“Communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed.”

James W. Carey offered this definition in Communication as Culture, published in 1989 from essays developed over many years. He challenged the idea that communication is only the transmission of information from sender to receiver. Messages also enact shared rituals: they establish what a community notices, repeats, values, and treats as real. Journalism therefore does more than deliver facts across distance. Through categories, routines, headlines, maps, and recurring story forms, it helps maintain a public world. That power carries responsibility because exclusion and repetition can make a partial picture feel natural.

For a newsroom, Carey’s insight invites scrutiny of everyday choices. Which institutions receive routine attention? Whose losses become statistics and whose become portraits? Which neighborhoods appear mainly in stories about danger? Editors should audit sourcing patterns, beats, labels, and visual conventions rather than treating each article as an isolated product. Reporters can widen the shared record by cultivating community sources before crises, following policies after announcements, and explaining how official categories were created. A correction should repair not only a sentence but also any false impression the original framing produced.

The formulation does not mean that reality is whatever communicators declare it to be. Material events, documents, measurements, and lived consequences constrain truthful accounts. Carey’s point is that people encounter much of public reality through symbols and social practices. That makes verification indispensable and humility necessary. Journalists should resist both naive objectivity, which denies the effects of framing, and cynical relativism, which treats every account as equally constructed. Evidence can rule out claims even when no single story exhausts the meaning of an event.

Carey’s definition is especially useful for understanding networked media. A hashtag, ranking, push alert, or repeated thumbnail can organize collective attention before an article is read. Recommendation systems maintain some realities while making others difficult to see. Newsrooms should examine distribution alongside production: how stories are titled for platforms, what context disappears in previews, and whether corrections reach the same audiences as errors. They can also create spaces for communities to question categories and contribute missing evidence. Regular source audits and listening sessions can reveal patterns that individual stories hide, including whose expertise is routinely trusted and whose experience appears only after harm. Repair requires institutional memory, not a one-day apology. Journalism strengthens democracy when it treats public reality as a shared construction that must be continually tested, repaired, and opened to more participants.