The Uses and Functions of Ageing Celebrity War Reporters (original) (raw)

Ageing Disgracefully: Gendered Recognition of Age-inappropriate Behaviour in Celebrity War Reporters

In The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Pierre Bourdieu (1991) attempts to account for the philosopher's career in terms of field strategies. Bourdieu's intention is not to reduce Heidegger's work to an algorithmic inevitability -its particular form could not have been predicted just by looking at the state of the philosophical field when he emerged -but he does argue that when you look back on Heidegger's oeuvre it does make sense purely in terms of historical context and more generally how individuals and institutions vie for prestige, status and power. Bourdieu observes that on entering the profession, young philosophers will seek to overturn a few sacred cows -this is central to the idea of cultural consecration, meaning that the way we compete against each other is not simply about seizing someone else's cultural capital, but appropriating and changing what is recognised as valuable and authoritative. In Heidegger's case what was overthrown was the Kantian understanding of ontology, Bourdieu's point being that if you look a little more deeply you'll see that what in fact transpired with the rise of Heideggerian phenomenology was a conservative revolution, with many of the principal tenets of neo-Kantianism remaining firmly in place. Now that's quite enough about Heidegger. But what I find useful about this example is what it

Gentlemen of the Press

Kosmorama - Journal of the The Danish Film Institute, 2014

Since the beginnings of cinema journalists have been amongst the professionals most frequently portrayed on the big screen. This article analyzes the image of journalists and media workers in Billy Wilder’s films. The Viennese director dedicated two works in his cinematographic career to the journalistic profession: Ace in the Hole and The Front Page. Simón Peña Fernández from University of the Basque Country is employing both quantitative and qualitative techniques in his content analysis.

The Celebrified Journalist

Journalism Studies

Ongoing transformations of the media ecology in the direction of greater digitization have increasingly blurred the boundaries between professional journalists and other information brokers; the former now must work hard to distinguish themselves from the latter. Notable among these developments is a shift towards the individualization of journalism, with journalists seeming to spend more time building personal brands, for instance on Twitter, than on building organizational ones. Within journalism research there is a growing interest in the use of Twitter for journalistic selfpromotion and branding, but studies are still scarce, and the ways in which journalistic self-promotion is discursively constituted need further empirical and theoretical attention. By means of a critical discourse analysis of the tweets of a widely followed journalist in Sweden, and through the theoretical lens of celebrity, this study aims to contribute knowledge about how journalistic self-promotion discourses evolving in the digitized media setting are constituted. The article identifies discourses that construct celebrity through (1) "fame by association," (2) asymmetrical communication, and (3) "lifestreaming." It concludes by discussing "celebrification" as a vital component of journalistic self-promotion discourses as well as the power aspects of ubiquitous self-promotional discourses, which are deeply embedded in the general structures of society.

Exposing Celebrity Scandal: How Journalism, Fame, and Audiences Coincide

2015

This thesis explores the world of celebrity scandal, investigating what happens when journalists report on star transgressions that disrupt prevailing codes of behaviour. The central assertion of this thesis is that in circulating controversy, journalists ultimately strive not to inform or to educate the public, but rather to gain audiences and sell papers. The analysis, intertwining cultural and political-economic viewpoints, is guided by two overarching goals: to address the elements that give celebrity scandal its resonance within contemporary culture, and to clearly delineate how these elements are mobilized to reap the full economic benefits of scandal. Three case studies, involving Kate Moss, Lance Armstrong, and Charlie Sheen, are examined to expose the mutually dependent relationship between the key players in scandal stories: those reporting (journalists), those being reported on (celebrities), and those responding (audiences). Concentrating on what drives scandal news circ...

The Political Phenomenology of War Reporting

2011

Drawing on interviews with war correspondents, editors, political and military personnel, this article investigates the political dimension of the structuration and structuring effects of the reporter’s experience of journalism. Self-reflection and judgements about colleagues confirm that there are dominant norms for interpreting and acting in conflict scenarios which, while contingent upon socio-historical context, are interpreted as natural. But the prevalence of such codes masks the systematically misrecognized symbolic systems of mystification and ambivalence – systems which reproduce hierarchies and gatekeeping structures in the field, but which are either experienced as unremarkable, dismissed with irony and cynicism, or not present to the consciousness of the war correspondent. The article builds on recent theories of journalistic disposition, ideology, discourse and professionalism, and describes the political dimension of journalistic practice perceived in the field as apolitical. It addresses the gendering of war correspondence, the rise of the journalist as moral authority, and questions the extent to which respondent reflections can be defensibly analytically determined.

EDITORIAL: Trials of celebrity

Pacific Journalism Review, 2013

THIS ISSUE of Pacific Journalism Review engages with the theme of the dynamics of fame in a small country. In contrast to the dominant focus in the newly emergent field of Celebrity Studies on celebrity as a global phenomenon, the emphasis in this issue is on the interface between the global and the local; on questions of how the distinctiveness of national and local values fares when caught up in or of willingly imitating the circulation of global fame and influence. Accounts of celebrity often focus on the notion of fetishism—the complex process through which specific idols become objects of veneration on whose admirable or even infamous qualities are presented as emanating from the inner recesses of a luminous personality. The importance of this aspect of celebrity and celebrity worship is not to be denied. But there is another feature of celebrity and stardom that complements and energises the engagement of fans, the interest of the general public and the ambitions of the press ...

Higgins, Michael. 2010. "The public inquisitor as media celebrity" CULTURAL POLITICS 6(1): 93-110.

Cultural Politics, 2010

This article looks at the development and utility of celebrity among high-profi le political interviewers. Offering the revised description "public inquisitor," the article presents an overview of the rise of the political interviewer as a celebrity form of the "tribune of the people" (Clayman 2002). It focuses on the UK-based journalists and broadcasters Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys, and looks at the expansion of their professional activities and their attendant construction as media personalities. It argues that the forms of celebrity presented by Paxman and Humphrys draw upon discourses of integrity and authenticity associated with practices of advocacy, and suggests that their extension beyond the formal political realm into media genres traditionally excluded from the established political domain might work to consolidate the > public inquisitor as a discursive fi gure. Therefore, while acknowledging that this depends on the effective management of individual media profi les, the article proposes a critical reappraisal of the place of the celebrity personae in political communication in order to account for the possibility of constructive modes of media performance.