“Like Judas to Jesus”: The semiotics of media instigation, or, how to counter the tactics of sincerity in Hiphop, Gaming, and News Journalism (original) (raw)
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Criticising journalism: Popular media criticism in the digital age
PhD Dissertation, 2019
Does criticism in digital spaces matter to journalism? Legacy news media face intense criticism on social networks or blogs, while their accountability towards the public is weak. This dissertation explores the contribution of digital media critics and their criticisms to journalism, through qualitative interviews with journalists, critics and media accountability agents. The main findings show how journalists negotiate a variety of criticisms (from the rational to the uncivil) and critics (with varying expertise and influence) in digital spaces. The study is relevant today because digitality complicates the journalist-critic relationship as critical text from the public circulate in the same universe as journalistic text. What this means is that journalists must find new ways to cope with the logics of digital platforms, such as social networks and blogs. At the same time, news professionals must respond to pressure to conform to social norms such as equity in gender representation in the news, that comes through, for example, hashtag campaigns on social networks.
Introduction - On the Fringe: Understanding Alternative and Subversive Media
Spectator Volume 37, No. 1 Spring 2017 Table of Contents: Introduction - On the Fringe: Understanding Alternative and Subversive Media - Eszter Zimanyi and Emma Ben Ayoun, University of Southern California Screening the Pre-Infant: Ultrasound and its Realisms - Lisa Han, UC Santa Barbara Classifying Information: The Opaque Logics of Terror Watchlists - Daniel Grinberg, UC Santa Barbara Audiovisual Black Subjectivity in Kahlil Joseph's "Double Conscience" - Jheanelle Brown, University of Southern California Solidification and Flux on the "Gay White Way": Gay Porn Theaters in New York City, 1969-1973 - Matthew Connolly, University of Wisconsin-Madison "I Can't Believe a Soldier Would Do A Thing Like That": The Monstrous Vietnam Veteran in the Exploitation Film - Robert J. Ashmore, University of Southern California The Marvelous City: Audiovisual Representations of Post-Special Period Havana - Bianka Ballina, UC Santa Barbara "I set out to do everything I could to bring this idea to fruition": Leila Jarman reflects on directing her first feature length documentary, Voice of the Valley - Eszter Zimanyi, University of Southern California
Bringing the sociology of media back in
Political Communication, 2004
In political communication research, news media tend to be studied more as a dependent than independent variable. That is, few studies link structural characteristics of media systems to the production of journalistic discourse about politics. One reason for this relative silence is the inadequacy of prevalent theories. Influential scholars in sociology and political communication such as Jrgen Habermas, Manuel Castells, and William Gamson provide only sketchy, institutionally underspecified accounts of media systems. Likewise, models in the sociology of news have tended to either aggregate societal level influences (chiefly political and economic) that are analytically and often empirically quite distinct or overemphasize micro-level influences (news routines, bureaucratic pressures). In between such micro- and macro-influences, the mezzo-level "journalistic field" represents an important shaping factor heretofore largely ignored. As path-dependent institutional logics, fields help ground cultural analysis; as interorganizational spatial environments varying in their level of concentration, they explain heretofore undertheorized aspects of news production. Drawing on the sociology of news and field theory (Bourdieu and American new institutionalism), this essay offers a series of hypotheses about how variable characteristics of media systems shape news discourse. Since variation at the system level is most clearly seen via cross-national comparative studies, international research is best positioned to build more generalizable theory about the production of journalistically mediated political discourse.
While HBO’s The Newsroom presents itself as fictional television, its narrative is driven by critiquing American cable news culture and contemporary journalism ethics. This article analyses popular reflections on the programme to identify what these discourses reveal about public evaluations of the state of the US news media. Based upon 1115 lengthy audience posts and discussions and 49 news articles, I argue that the response to this supposedly ‘fictional’ newscast nonetheless reveals a highly politicized scepticism about the actual news media and a corresponding – although fairly depoliticized and surprisingly uniform – nostalgic lament for the journalism of days gone by. Similarly, findings suggest that the traditional modernist discourse of journalism as a public good persists – both among journalists and the public – despite the evident commercial underpinnings of the American media system. The study finds that audiences and journalists alike use the show as a catalyst to (1) ‘name and shame’ news outlets – including the fictional Newsroom, (2) engage in political confrontation and (3) employ the rhetoric and metanarratives of the Anglo-American objectivity regime to define ‘good’ journalism. However, it also finds that while individuals may embrace critique, they often lack critical skills to go beyond politicized accusations of bias.
From "Public Journalism" to "Engaged Journalism": Imagined Audiences and Denigrating Discourse
International Journal of Communication, 2020
At a moment of intense uncertainty within the news industry, a growing number believe the key to the profession’s survival depends on journalists improving their relationship with the public. As a result, many news practitioners, funders, and scholars have begun advocating for journalists to “engage” with their audiences, thus expanding the audience’s role in the news production process. In this study, we use a textual analysis of metajournalistic discourse from journalism trade magazines to reveal that although the specific language surrounding “engaged” journalism is new, its reconceptualization of the journalist–audience relationship traces back to the public journalism movement of the 1990s. Our findings illustrate that these movements are remarkably similar in their motivations, their goals, and—most importantly—the way in which their advocates imagine the news audience. The results are interpreted with an eye toward of the future of the industry and the potential effects of these interventions.
The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Cultural Power
Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Science, 2015
Recent technological change and the economic upheaval it has produced are coded by social meanings. Cultural codes not only trigger technological and economic changes, but also provide pathways to control them, allowing the democratic practices of independent journalism to be sustained in new forms. Even as they successfully defend their professional ethics, however, journalists experience them as vulnerable to subversion in the face of technological and economic change. Indeed, independent journalists and the social groups who support them often feel as if they are losing the struggle for autonomy. Just as current anxieties have been triggered by computerization and digital news, so were earlier crises of journalism linked to technological shifts that demanded new forms of economic organization. Digital production has created extraordinary organizational upheaval and economic strain. At the same time, critical confrontations with digital production have triggered innovative organizational forms that allow new technologies to sustain, rather than undermine, the democratic culture and institution of news production. If news producers are making efforts to adapt professional journalism to the digital age while maintaining journalistic civil values, there are parallel adaptations from the digital side: digital journalism becoming more like professional journalism. (This essay will form the introduction to Jeffrey C. Alexander, Elizabeth Breese, and Maria Luengo, eds., The Crisis of Journalism to Reconsidered: Cultural Power (Cambridge University Press). It was first presented at a conference of the book’s contributors in Barcelona, Spain, hosted by the Social Trends Institute, on April 25–26, 2014. The project benefited significantly from the conference that STI made possible.)