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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Concepts in Journalism
- Sprache: Englisch
The public, James Carey famously wrote, is the �god-term� of journalism, �the term without which the entire enterprise fails to make sense.� In the last thirty years, scholars have made great progress in understanding just what this means.
In this much-needed new book, leading scholar David Ryfe takes readers on a journey through the literature that explores this most important of relationships. He discusses how and why journalism first emerged in the United States, and why journalism everywhere shares a family resemblance but is nowhere practised in precisely the same way. He goes on to explain why journalists have such difficulty talking about the business aspects of their profession, and explores the boundaries of the field�s collective imagination. Ryfe looks at the nature of change in journalism, providing sketches of its possible futures. Ultimately, he argues that the public is a keyword for journalism because it is impossible to understand the practice without it.
This rich and insightful guide will prove indispensable for anyone interested in understanding the practice of journalism.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Tradition
A New Approach
Chapter 1: Theory
Publics
Rules and Resources
Journalism
Journalism and the Public
Chapter 2: Emergence
Early Cases
The French Counter-Example
The Development of the American Field
The Field of French Journalism
The Form of News
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Outside the West
History
Markets
The Chinese Field of Journalism
Investigative Journalism
Conclusion
Chapter 4: The Journalistic Imagination
Normative Accounts
Journalism Should Tell the Truth
Journalism Should Build Community
Journalism Should Foster Deliberative Conversation
What Should Journalists Do?
Chapter 5: Journalism and Change
A Recap
Mapping Change
Time and Change
Persistence
Conclusion
Chapter 6: Moving Forward
What We Know
What We Do Not Know
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
1.1 Institutional Spheres of Public Life
2.1 The Journalistic Field in the United States
2.2 Journalists in Nineteenth-Century French Public Life
2.3 A Distribution of News Organizations across “Modern Journalism”
2.4 The Field of French Journalism
3.1 Public Life in Chinese Thought
3.2 Market-Based Journalism in Chinese Society
3.3 Chinese News Organizations in Public Life
4.1 Journalism’s Collective Vision
5.1 The Journalistic Field in the United States
5.2 A Deflated Field of Journalism
List of Tables
1.1 Four Institutional Spheres
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Key Concepts in Journalism
Citizen Witnessing, Stuart Allan
Objectivity in Journalism, Steven Maras
Journalism and the Public, David M. Ryfe
Reinventing Professionalism, Silvio Waisbord
Journalism and the Public
David M. Ryfe
polity
Copyright © David Ryfe 2017
The right of David Ryfe to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1444-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ryfe, David, 1966- author.Title: Journalism and the public / David M. Ryfe.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Series: Key concepts in journalism | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016016772| ISBN 9780745671604 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745671611 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509514434 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509514441 (Epub)Subjects: LCSH: Journalism. | Journalism--Social aspects. | BISAC: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Journalism.Classification: LCC PN4749 .R97 2017 | DDC 302.23--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016016772
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Preface
This book began as an informal conversation. During a meeting at one conference or another, a Polity editor mentioned that the Press had begun a new series, Key Concepts in Journalism, and asked what I thought. I said it sounded like an excellent idea, and then I said something like, “and you can’t publish such a series without a volume on journalism and the public.” It is, after all, perhaps the key concept in journalism. No series would be complete without a book on the subject. She agreed, and then said, “You should write it.” I quickly said yes. Later, I realized maybe I had answered too quickly. When I agreed to write the book, I had in mind a compendium of “greatest hits” on the subject, one that began with Tocqueville, grappled with Lippmann and Dewey, and made a long detour into Habermas’s public sphere. It is a litany anyone acquainted with our field could recite. “I can write this book,” I said to myself with some confidence.
Well, it has turned out to be the hardest piece of writing I have ever completed. I thought I knew my subject pretty well, but it turns out I was mistaken. In the past several decades, an enormous amount of work has been accomplished across a range of subfields. Some of this work has been published by scholars outside of journalism studies, in disciplines that rarely intersect with our own. Early on, for example, I spent six months lost in a fascinating literature on early modern English news. Published primarily by historians, in their own disciplinary journals, this literature is nonetheless extraordinarily important for understanding the history of journalism’s relationship to public life. Other work has been completed by scholars of journalism, but has appeared across small subfields, like the study of Scandinavian journalism, or comparative journalism studies, or production studies, or news and technology studies. Still other work, borrowed from field theory or institutionalism, has trained a new theoretical lens on journalism. For a scholar used to burrowing into his own subfield of news production studies, reading across this work was difficult. But as I read, I began to feel that, though they wrote for different audiences about different topics, these literatures together were telling a broader story about journalism, and at the heart of this story lay some conception of the public. I knew then that writing a book on the “greatest hits” would not suffice.
It took a good long while for me to be confident that I had canvassed these literatures sufficiently. It took another length of time to piece the story together, and longer still to explain it in a way that might make sense to an interested (but not expert) reader. This last point is important, as I expect a good number of experts will read this book. As I set about my task, I realized that I had taken on a great deal of risk, namely, the risk of mischaracterizing or misrepresenting an argument, or theme, within a particular subfield. It is a risk anyone takes who attempts to write across several disciplinary subfields, which may be one reason it is not often done. As a hedge against this risk, whenever possible, I have consulted with the experts.
I run another risk as well. It is that the volume may not attend to a particular detail, concept, or argument in the way that an expert might wish I had done. An expert in field theory, for instance, may remark that I haven’t done the theory justice. I should have dwelt longer on this point, or emphasized that concept. Or, an expert on a given national news system may complain that I have missed important contextual nuances about her subject. This is a more subtle risk than simply getting something wrong, and the risk is therefore more difficult to hedge against.
I worried about this dilemma for some time. Eventually, I resolved that my intention was to write for a lay audience. I wished to introduce this audience to the broad story of journalism under development in the scholarship, and to show how and why the concept of the public is vital to this story. For this reason, I chose to summarize ideas that experts might wish to unpack, and (where possible) I avoided becoming tangled in disputes they may wish to prosecute. Throughout, I provide citations for the reader interested in accessing the more dense and detailed conversations taking place in these literatures. My choices may not satisfy some experts in the various subfields. But I hope most come away from the exercise with the realization that I have not done egregious harm to their arguments., and I hope they leave with a greater appreciation for how their work contributes to the larger narrative developing in the field.
More than this, I hope that lay readers come away impressed with the centrality of the public’s role in this story. If I have achieved this much, I will have met my goal.
Acknowledgments
This book took years to complete and I have accumulated many debts along the way. I want to give special thanks to the many colleagues who have read chapters and parts of chapters. They include: Chin-Chuan Lee, Judy Polumbaum, Zhongdang Pan, Michael Schudson, Daniel Hallin, and Silvio Waisbord. I want to give a special thanks to Rodney Benson, who provided muchneeded feedback at several moments during this research. I also have had conversations with many people about the project. I want to thank a few of them for comments or information that have made their way into the manuscript. Among others, they include Daniel Kreiss, Peter Lunt, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Matthew Carlson, C. W. Anderson, Dan Berkowitz, Sue Robinson, and Seth Lewis. I also owe a debt to the anonymous reviewers for Polity, who provided helpful suggestions for making the manuscript better. A special thank you to Andrea Drugan, who put me on to the idea for this book, and Elen Griffiths at Polity, who has been extraordinarily patient with me as I slowly cobbled together the manuscript.
Introduction
Along a number of fronts, the study of journalism has made great strides in the last generation. Scholars have assessed journalism from the perspective of media systems (Hallin and Mancini, 2004) and journalistic fields (Benson, 2013). They have approached news as institutions (Cook, 1998), organizations (Ryfe, 2012), and ecosystems (Anderson, 2013). They have defined journalism as a profession (Waisbord, 2013) and as a set of role conceptions (Weaver and Willnat, 2012). They have plumbed journalism’s history (Høyer and Pöttker, 2005), and compared its practice across a variety of contexts (Canel and Voltmer, 2014).
As this work mounts, the story it tells of journalism is becoming clearer. At its heart, I shall argue, stands a relatively simple idea: journalism tends to express the form of public life in which it is embedded. This is not a new idea. One finds versions of it stretching back at least to the early nineteenth century. Tocqueville’s (1840/1969) famous phrase, “newspapers make associations and associations make newspapers” (p. 517), is one example of it. Carey’s (1987, p. 5) declaration that the public is journalism’s “god term,” its “be-all and end-all, the term without which the entire enterprise fails to make sense” is a modern rendition. But it is not a simple idea. This point hasn’t always been accepted or its implications understood. For decades, most observers assumed that a homogenized form of journalism was naturally predisposed to an invariant form of democratic public life. More of this kind of journalism, the thought went, equals more democracy (and vice versa). More recent scholarship suggests that this conclusion is too simple. The implications of public life for journalism are complex, dependent on a host of variables and contingencies. The need to contextualize, however, does nothing to detract from the power of the idea. There are good reasons that observers have returned to it over the centuries, and that it now animates a good deal of thinking about journalism. Perhaps no other single idea illuminates as much about the practice of journalism.
In the chapters that follow, I rely on this concept of journalism reflecting its context to tell the story of journalism that is unfolding in the literature. The drama of the story inheres in the pushing and pulling between a profession seeking greater autonomy and the social fields nearby that would shape its form and purpose. Even in Anglo-America, where for a time it enjoyed a high degree of autonomy, journalism has never gained complete control over its conditions of existence. Its boundaries always have blurred with contiguous social fields, especially the state and, depending on context, civil and political society, or the market as well. Journalism is thus always in a tussle with these other social fields. As we shall see, the story of journalism is one of contingency and probability, not of certainty, but the pushing and pulling give journalism its form and meaning.
This story has not emerged in vacuum. Rather, it has been built partly on the basis of, and partly in response to, prior thinking about journalism’s relationship to the public. It seems sensible to begin there, then, with the traditional story told about this relationship.
The Tradition
That story begins in the Middle Ages. The origins of modern news writing dovetail with the rise of European monarchies. The handwritten diplomatic news sheets that circulated in Venice in the late fifteenth century were the earliest form of modern newsgathering (Stephens, 1998). By the mid-1500s, occasional newsletters, ballads, and broadsides joined these sheets, and by the early 1600s the first periodicals emerged in England, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. As monarchies expanded, so did news systems. The two grew together for several reasons. First, another name for monarchy is bureaucracy, and the soldiers and bureaucrats who populated monarchical bureaucracies constituted the first sources of news (Dooley, 1999). Second, as monarchies waged the seemingly perpetual wars necessary to gain control over larger and larger territories, and centralized this control in urban centers (such as London or Paris), they also generated a new demand for news. This demand came in part from members of the aristocracy interested in news from the latest battlefield. But most of it came from the noble families of the countryside, who were keenly interested in the political goings-on in London, but too far removed from the scene to obtain this information first-hand. “You cannot imagine,” one seventeenth-century English observer said at the time, “to what a disease the itch of news is grown” (quoted in Atherton, 1998). The earliest newsletters scratched this itch.
As the number of news writers increased and the amount of news multiplied, monarchies adopted two policies that further entangled them with budding news systems: regulation and subsidy.
Authorities began to make new rules about who could gather and circulate news, and under what conditions. All over Europe, for example, censorship of news was more the rule than the exception (Popkin, 1990; Roche, 1989; Todd, 1991). When they could not control the news through regulation, authorities sought to do so through taxes and requirements for “caution money,” a bond or deposit against damages (Curran, 1978; Starr, 2004). When neither of these policies succeeded in stemming the growth of news, monarchies went into the business of subsidizing favored news organizations. Even as they fined, imprisoned, and taxed news producers, for instance, European authorities routinely paid writers and publishers to produce official news (Starr, 2004, p. 39).
This history is the context for the first theories of the press and its relationship to public life, which emerged around the English Civil Wars of the 1660s. At that time, writers such as John Milton (2014) began to argue that a free press (defined as a press unimpeded by the state) was central to a more democratic public life. In this argument, journalism is seen as an outside force assisting a public—defined as a body of citizens living within a geographic territory—to gain more control over politics and policymaking. In the decades after, other thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Montesquieu, and Thomas Jefferson followed Milton’s lead (Keane, 1991; Levy, 1985). The logic in each case was the same: to function well, democratic government required legitimacy; such legitimacy could only be obtained through transparency, that is, citizens needed to know what government was doing, and more than that have opportunities to discuss and debate these activities; in a large society, these thinkers asked, how else could this happen if not through a medium like the news? According to this logic, the press is essential because without it the whole enterprise of democracy is not possible.
What began in the seventeenth century as a radical idea was, by the nineteenth century, commonplace. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, John Stuart Mill (1859/1978) began his classic defense of liberalism with the observation that “no argument can now be needed” as to the importance of a free press for democratic society. To Mill’s way of thinking, the notion was now common sense. Tocqueville (1840/1969) offered perhaps the most famous nineteenth-century version of it when he observed: “The more equal men become, the more necessary are newspapers. We should underrate their importance if we thought they just guaranteed liberty; they maintain civilization” (pp. 517–18).
Tocqueville was not quite as sanguine about this development as one might suppose. In a democracy, he argued, power worked in a new, insidious way. “Monarchs,” he wrote, “materialized oppression.” By this he meant that when citizens acted out, monarchs responded with physical violence. In a democracy, Tocqueville surmised, oppression worked in a very different way. “The democratic republics of the present day,” Tocqueville wrote, “have rendered [oppression] as entirely an affair of the mind” (p. 255). Majorities in democratic societies placed boundaries around per-sonal freedom by creating a conventional wisdom about what it was appropriate to believe, say, and do. This common sense made it unnecessary to resort to violence, as people naturally curtailed their own thinking and behavior. Tocqueville coined a term for this new form of power: the “tyranny of the majority.” The press was complicit in the exercise of this power. In democratic societies, he observed, newspapers were instruments of freedom, but also of oppression.
The first modern sociological studies of journalism and democracy of the twentieth century picked up on Tocqueville’s pessimism. Tarde (1901/1969), for instance, warns that “the man of one book [may be] feared . . . but what is he beside the man of one newspaper” (p. 283). Far from ensuring independence and freedom, Tarde argues, newspapers tend to make their readers “homogeneous” and “pliable.” That is, the news makes it easy for journalists and politicians to manipulate citizens. Writing in the same period, Tönnies (1916/2000) is, if anything, even more biting. To him, the modern press is little more than “showmanship in search of sensational news . . . exaggeration . . . exploitation.” He concludes: “An honest discussion or just an honest treatment of news . . . can never be expected from newspapers” (p. 153).
Walter Lippmann (1922) consolidates these apprehensions into perhaps the most famous criticism of modern news, and of the democratic theory in which it plays such a vital role. After admitting that the press “is not so universally wicked” as many observers assume, Lippmann lists the myriad problems with the received wisdom. In the first instance, modern societies are too complex and daily news is too fragmented and ephemeral for it to convey an accurate picture of reality. Second, newspapers are too commercial and sensationalist to even attempt to paint such a picture. Third, even if newspapers wished to try, political and economic elites, who have great incentives to manage the news, would not allow them to succeed., and finally, even if publishers, journalists, policymakers, and businessmen worked together to inform the public, readers do not have the cognitive capacity to learn as much as is required to fashion informed opinions on every subject. Lippmann’s conclusion: “If the newspapers . . . are to be charged with the duty of translating the whole of public life to mankind, so that every adult can arrive at an opinion on every moot topic, they fail, they are bound to fail, in any future one can conceive they will continue to fail.” At best, the public is a “phantom,” a fiction conjured by those in positions of political power, and promulgated by a relatively subservient press. John Dewey (1922) was so struck by Lippmann’s argument he called it the “most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned.”
Strangely enough, though read widely, even today, Lippmann’s indictment has had little impact on the prevailing wisdom. Through the twentieth century, common sense continued to hold that a “free press” was essential to modern democracy. In the twentieth century, Europe governments subsidized the press based precisely on this assumption. In Anglo-America, journalism was not directly subsidized. However, it did gain great symbolic power, in large part due to its reputation as a bulwark of political liberty. Certainly, journalists had little interest in dispelling the notion. When, in the early twentieth century, journalism coalesced into a more or less cohesive social field, it did so partly on the basis that the occupation played a vital role in democracy. As evidence, consider the mission statement of the Society of Professional Journalists, an organization founded in the United States in 1909: “To ensure that the concept of self-government outlined by the U.S. Constitution remains a reality into future centuries, the American people must be well informed in order to make decisions regarding their lives, and their local and national communities. It is the role of journalists to provide this information.” Or this goal of the European Federation of Journalists (an organization that represents journalists throughout the European Union), “to promote the social role of journalism and the profession of journalism, particularly its contribution to democracy and freedom.” Everywhere journalism professionalized, its supposed contribution to democratic public life served as an organizing principle.
In this way, a narrative about journalism and the public was born. It arose centuries ago, dispersed over time, and, by the twentieth century, became a powerful common-sense idea. Over the last decades, journalists have exported the idea globally (Chalaby, 1996), partly through the help of their governments (Siebert et al., 1956; Blanchard, 1986). The academy has played a role in its dissemination as well. Proponents of modernization theory, for instance, imagined that social development occurred in a linear direction, from traditional toward modern societies. They took the emergence of a western-style press to be a key marker of this transition (Lerner, 1958; Schramm, 1964). More generally, as Zelizer (2012) observes, “western scholarship on journalism . . . has tended to adopt the journalism/democracy nexus as a naturalized part of understanding what journalism is for” (p. 465). Even today, a great deal of research in journalism studies is motivated by the question of whether, and the extent to which, journalism contributes to the formation of democratic publics.
The result is a particular story about journalism and the public. In this story, journalism is a relatively narrow pursuit, constrained to its coverage of formal politics. There may be other forms of journalism, among them tabloid, opinion, and entertainment journalism, but they lie at the margins of the occupation. Its preferred practices are reduced to a set of elements, such as verification and balance, which orbit around the general concept of objectivity (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2001). The notion of the public at play in this story is just as constrained, limited as it is to the citizenry that lives within the geographic borders of the state. Just as one example, the market lies outside this conception of the public, as does the state itself. With these stock characters in place, the story offers a two-dimensional plot, one in which journalism either contributes to empowering the public to participate in democratic life (and so plays the hero), or it does not (and so plays the villain). This story has played out in countless iterations over the centuries, and so represents a great deal of the common-sense thinking about journalism and the public.
A New Approach
In the last few decades, scholars have chipped away at this received wisdom. From one direction, historians have come to realize that journalism is not a discrete and singular object. Rather, its form and meaning has varied over time. The term itself—journalism—wasn’t even invented until the 1830s, and referred specifically to the commercial news organizations then emerging in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. Before that time, there were journalists but no journalism; there was news, but it meant something different across time and space. This point comes out especially well in a wonderful literature on seventeenthand eighteenth-century English news production (Doty, 2008; Halasz, 1997; Peacey, 2013; Zaret, 2000). As Örnebring (2007) notes, whether packaged in pamphlets or newsletters, during this period news was not “‘news’ . . . in the sense of reports about recent events. Instead, [it] mainly consisted of criticism . . . with the intention to express and possibly influence opinion” (p. 75). Whether written by hand or printed, seventeenth-century news was rooted in oral traditions, making its form and meaning utterly different from today. In short, historians have come to see any suggestion that there is one form of journalism as woefully ahistorical.
The same thought applies to our other key term—the public. In the traditional view, the public is defined as a body of citizens who live within particular geographic borders. This is a peculiarly western, and modern, definition—but there have been others. For example, as I discuss in Chapter One, the original meaning of “the public” was the state, not a body of citizens. At various times and places, the public also has been taken to mean civil society, political society, and even economic markets. In other words, the concept of the public has multiple meanings, only one of which is the common definition today: “people who live within the borders of a nation-state.” A burgeoning comparative literature on journalism illustrates this point. Think, for example, of China, which had a form of news writing centuries before the West, but which in its entire history has experienced democracy only for a few decades. In China, the public is nearly synonymous with the state. For this reason, Chinese journalism’s relationship to the public is nearly untranslatable in terms of the western canon. Examples of this kind abound, leading many scholars to wonder if the canon about journalism is not only ahistorical but western-centric as well (Curran and Park, 2000; Downing, 1996).
These two thoughts together put everything into play. Not only can we not lead with fixed definitions of journalism, we cannot assume an invariant public either. Instead, we have to ask how different forms of journalism emerge within different forms of public life. Our focus is no longer on “the public” or on “journalism,” but on the relationship between them. This relational approach has opened the way to rethinking journalism’s connection to the public.
Siebert et al.’s Four Theories of the Press (1956) represents a bridge to this new approach. Theirs is one of the first studies to recognize that “the press always takes on the form and coloration of the social and political structures within which it operates” (p. 1). As they survey the landscape, they perceive four such political structures: authoritarian structures of traditional societies; libertarian structures of early modern western societies; the structure of the modern western social welfare state (and its ethos of social responsibility); and the Communist structure of the Soviet Union. As you can see, their argument anticipates the notion that journalism gains coherence relationally, in interaction with other arenas of public life. Yet, in some respects, Four Theories is every bit as abstract, rigid, and normative as the traditional view. For instance, it assumes that in particular societies journalism is everywhere the same. Whether an alternative weekly or a daily national newspaper, a newspaper, or a TV newscast, all news organizations in a libertarian society are colored by the same theory. Also, much as in modernization theory, there is a clear sense of historical progress within this narrative: western societies are cast as moving progressively from authoritarian theories toward a more modern (and advanced) libertarian and finally socially responsible theory of the press (Nerone, 1995). Finally, in some respects the argument merely flips the terms of the traditional argument. Where in the past journalism was taken as producing the conditions for a singular democratic public, now the public is seen as producing the conditions for a singular form of journalism. Siebert et al. perceive little interaction between journalism and the public.
Modern approaches retain Siebert et al.’s sense that journalism is “colored” by “the social and political structures within which it operates.” However, they revise and add to it in significant ways. In Chapter One, we will consider these additions in a more substantive way, but let me briefly review three of the most important.
A good place to start is with Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) three models of media systems. The authors address a similar question as Siebert et al.: why are media systems in Anglo-America and Western Europe structured so differently from each other? Like Siebert et al., they find their answer in the way that public life is structured. Where the Four Theories authors understand public life in terms of public philosophies (such as authoritarianism and liberalism), Hallin and Mancini define it in terms of four empirically accessible dimensions: political parallelism: in some societies media systems parallel the political party system and in others they do not; professionalization: in some societies journalism has professionalized, and in some it has not; state intervention: in some societies, the state has intervened strongly in the constitution of media systems, and in others it has not; and mass markets: in some societies a mass market for news developed and in others it did not. Variations along these dimensions, Hallin and Mancini argue, have produced different sorts of media systems. Further, since groups of nations (Scandinavia, Anglo-America, Southern Europe) tend to exhibit similar variations along these dimensions, the media systems in these societies tend to resemble one another (hence, the “three models” of media systems).
For Hallin and Mancini, public life is not one object (or idea, or philosophy) but many elements that interact together in time. This is to say, the relationship among the elements, and between the elements and journalism, may change over time. It is possible for social scientists to measure these elements, to detect how they interact with one another, and to trace their historical trajectory as a way of assessing how and why journalism takes the form that it does.
Hallin and Mancini go to great lengths to qualify their conclusions (see also Hallin and Mancini, 2012). They describe their models as “ideal types.” They acknowledge that considerable variation exists among countries grouped together within the models. They admit that media systems are not homogeneous. Media may operate by different principles within particular societies. They note that media systems are not static., and they observe that media shape public life just as (if not as much) as public life shapes the media. The models, they write, should “not be seen as describing a set of fixed characteristics, but as identifying some of the underlying systemic relationships that help us to understand changes” within media systems over time (p. 12). Still, since its publication, their study has become a primary point of reference, as Brüggemann et al. (2014, p. 1038) put it, for an explosion of comparative work in journalism and political communication.
For all its value, however, in stimulating new thinking, the book has limits. For one thing, in confining itself to the level of media system, it doesn’t follow up on the idea that different news organizations may occupy different positions in public life. For another, it doesn’t explain precisely how different configurations of public life produce different outcomes for journalism. In several places, Hallin and Mancini refer vaguely to “co-existences” and “reflections” in the evolution of particular systems. In their discussion of the “Democratic-Corporatist” model, for instance, they trace the historical development of several “co-existences” between the variables (mass markets, professionalization, and political parallelism) and media system outcomes, but do not directly address the question of why these co-existences should produce this outcome rather than another. In short, they describe more than they explain. This is reasonable, given the exploratory nature of their study, but it leaves work to be done.
Some of that work has been accomplished from a different angle, that of field theory (Benson, 2013; Benson and Neveu, 2005; Willig, 2012). Field theory in the social sciences has a long lineage, stretching back to the 1930s (Mey, 1972; Martin, 2003). Among journalism scholars, however, Bourdieu’s version of it has been most influential. Bourdieu’s work can be quite complicated, and we will consider it in more detail in later chapters. Here, I simply wish to flag a few basic ideas to show how his ideas fill in a few of the gaps in Hallin and Mancini’s analysis. The first is that, for Bourdieu, the arenas of public life identified by Hallin and Mancini—the state, political society, civil society, and the market—are not dimensions of public life so much as discrete social fields. Bourdieu (1985) defines a social field as an area of social space organized by “the set of properties active within the social universe in question” (p. 724). He calls these properties forms of capital, and they are the basis on which any particular social space is defined. This is not the place to explore why Bourdieu chose the language of economics (such as the term “capital”) to describe society (see instead Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, pp. 118–120; Brubaker, 1985, p. 749; Lebaron, 2003). It is enough to understand that, although it may take many forms (economic, cultural, symbolic), capital organizes and orders the space within a social field by establishing symbolic oppositions and hierarchies.
As an illustration of how this happens, consider the example of the state. The state is a social field organized by its own peculiar forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1986b). Preeminent among these is the law. At its base, the law is a kind of logic, a way of apprehending and representing the world. As such, it contains preferred beliefs, norms, values, language, practices, identities, and roles. Among other things, this logic establishes symbolic oppositions. Within the state, an action may be legal or illegal (or more and less legal). This is a different opposition than, say, moral or immoral, which helps to organize the civic field, or profitable or unprofitable, which does the same for the economic field. The law also establishes grounds for distinction within the state. The more conversant one is with the logic of lawmaking (such as how to speak in legal terms, how to get a law passed), the more of this form of capital one accumulates, and, correspondingly, the more status one obtains within this field. In these ways, the law—and all its attendant values, norms, conventions, practices, behaviors, and identities—helps to organize and order the social field we refer to as the state.
Bourdieu argues that forms of social capital within social fields exercise force on actors much as physical fields (like gravitational or electromagnetic fields) exercise force on objects: by pulling and pushing actors who come within their orbit. Importantly, Bourdieu imagines these forces as relational. In a gravitational field, the force of gravity arises in the relation of objects to one another. The larger its mass, the more force a given object applies to other objects. Similarly, actors within social fields may accrue more and less of the forms of capital peculiar to those fields, and so exercise more and less force on other actors. Within a social field, force is produced by the interaction between actors. The same is true across social fields. No social field stands alone, completely autonomous and thus immune to the influence of other social fields. Instead, social fields bump into one another, and even blur into one another. The forms of capital peculiar to each push and pull against one another. They create friction, and thus excite action.
How do these concepts help us understand the relation of public life to journalism? Well, think of journalism as a social field. Within the terms of field theory, when we say that public life “colors” journalism, we mean something like the following: arenas of public life (such as the state, civil and political society, and the market) contain distinctive forms of capital; these forms of capital consist of values and norms, identities and behaviors, practices and recipes for action; because journalism fits between the social fields that inhabit public life, they exercise more and less force on journalism and journalists, pushing and pulling them in different directions. The state pulls in one direction, the market in another, and civil society in still another direction. As Hallin and Mancini suggest, the outcome of this pushing and pulling depends on the precise configuration of the social fields, the relative strength of the forces involved, and the ability of journalism to push back.
In the English-speaking world at least, no one has taken greater advantage of these combined insights for understanding journalism than Rodney Benson (Benson, 2013; Benson and Neveu, 2005). Following Bourdieu, Benson (2006) imagines journalism as a social field structured, in the first instance, by economic capital (circulation, ad revenue, ratings) and cultural capital (the forms of knowledge, expertise, credentials, and the like valued within journalism). He then posits a role for the state, in the form of media policies, in exerting pressure on the field. Thus, on Benson’s view, journalism is pushed from one direction by the state, from another by the market, and internally by a professional culture.
In a series of studies (2002, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2013), Benson uses this image to compare French and American journalism (the subject of Chapter Two in this volume). He finds that French journalism is much less oriented to the market than American journalism. Advertising expenditures are much lower in France than they are in the US, as are circulation rates, and French news companies tend to be privately owned rather than publicly traded. Further, the state has a history of strong intervention in French journalism that is virtually nonexistent in the United States. Historically, French journalism has been centralized in Paris, and emerged out of the literary and political scene of that city. It has retained these ties ever since, orienting the field more to politics and literature than in the United States.
These variations in the way that journalism is situated in public life, Benson argues, have resulted in different “logics” at work in each journalistic field, and thus in forms of news. French news tends to be more literary and polemical than American news, to represent the views of a broader range of political actors, and to structure the news in terms of debates between these actors. In contrast, American news tends to be more “fact-centered,” to be more elite-driven, to be dramatized in terms of personalized narrative, and to be more politically neutral. Benson is careful to note that the two are not diametrically opposed. French and American journalism share a family resemblance. They are not identical, however. The differences between them are due to the way in which journalism is situated differently in public life. We will discuss these differences in more detail in Chapter Two.
Field theory goes a long way toward filling in the gaps between Hallin and Mancini’s dimensions of public life and outcomes within journalism. In particular, its conception of social fields explains well how the various arenas of public life exert pressure on journalism. But like Hallin and Mancini’s “three models” approach, field theory has shortcomings. For instance, it says little about the role of organizations in public life. In Bourdieu’s imagination (1985), public life is composed of classes of people, not organizations. It also offers a vague account of how individual actors act within social fields that is not always persuasive. Bourdieu argues that the logic of social fields does not determine individual action. Rather, it shapes what he calls “habituses.” In one place, he (1977) notes that were it not for its connotation of rote reproduction, he would have preferred to use the more conventional term “habit” (p. 218, n. 47). Elsewhere, he defines a habitus as a “practical sense of things,” or “sense of the game” that actors acquire as they are socialized into a given field. He then links this term directly to the body, arguing (1980) that a habitus is “a state of the body” rather than a “state of mind” (p. 68). Inhabiting a habitus is a matter of bodily disposition, of implicit, largely unreflective manners and sensibilities. It “designates a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the body) and, in particular, a disposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination” (1977, p. 214). Upon entering a social field, individuals acquire its habits. They learn, in other words, to play the game. In this way, fields (or structures) create the conditions (the rules of the game) within which it is possible for individuals to act, but do not determine any particular action. In another place (1998), Bourdieu uses the term illusio to describe the investments individuals are required to make in the logic of a field—a “tacit [recognition] that it is worth the effort to struggle for the things that are in play in the field” (p. 78).
In the notion of habitus, Bourdieu tries to show how structures influence actions but do not determine them. Conceptually, the idea makes some sense. Much as the game of chess contains a set of rules that shape how people may act when playing the game without determining the action itself, so habituses may play the same role for the games of social fields. Empirically, however, Bourdieu’s analyses tend to conclude that actors simply replicate the logic of the fields they inhabit. This has led many commentators to question why a habitus is not simply a habit, and, on Bourdieu’s conception, what freedom actors actually have in resisting the habitus of the fields they inhabit (for a discussion, see Calhoun et al., 1993). How is it, in other words, that social fields supposedly endow individuals with creativity and yet in the end
