Battle of the Classes: News Consumption Inequalities and Symbolic Boundary Work (original) (raw)
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Young people, class and the news: Distinction, socialization and moral sentiments
Journalism studies almost exclusively rely on a “sociology of integration” perspective when theorizing the social function of journalism. Focus is put on if and how journalism facilitates democratic processes, encourages civic engagement and strengthens the sense of community. In providing an alternative view, this study mobilizes the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu – a “sociologist of conflict” – in order to study how young people’s conditions of existence have given rise to vastly different orientations towards news and the normative order surrounding journalism. Based on focus group interviews with young people in Brazil and Sweden, the study shows that socialization into the world of news in the family and in school generates class-distinctive news orientations. The world of news is a site where social groups draw moral and cultural boundaries against each other. Since different social groups monopolize completely different news practices and preferences, they work to legitimate social differences. As such, the findings challenge common notions of news as creating the “healthy citizen”, and that news media provide spaces for the practice of civility and citizenship.
Young People, Class and the News
Journalism Studies, 2017
Journalism studies almost exclusively rely on a "sociology of integration" perspective when theorizing the social function of journalism. Focus is put on if and how journalism facilitates democratic processes, encourages civic engagement and strengthens the sense of community. In providing an alternative view, this study mobilizes the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu-a "sociologist of conflict"-in order to study how young people's conditions of existence have given rise to vastly different orientations towards news and the normative order surrounding journalism. Based on focus group interviews with young people in Brazil and Sweden, the study shows that socialization into the world of news in the family and in school generates class-distinctive news orientations. The world of news is a site where social groups draw moral and cultural boundaries against each other. Since different social groups monopolize completely different news practices and preferences, they work to legitimate social differences. As such, the findings challenge common notions of news as creating the "healthy citizen", and that news media provide spaces for the practice of civility and citizenship.
Distinction recapped: Digital news repertoires in the class structure
New Media & Society
This article mobilizes Pierre Bourdieu's full theory-method to study how class shapes our news orientations in a digital, high-choice media environment. An online survey (N = 3 850) was used to create a statistical representation of the contemporary Swedish social space with variables measuring access to economic, cultural, social and cosmopolitan capital. A range of digital news preferences and practices were then given coordinates in that space. Results highlight the importance of class habitus for the formation of digital news repertoires. Since different groups form altogether different news repertoires – and distaste the preferences of the groups most different to themselves (in terms of access to capitals) – news practices and preferences solidify the positions of groups in the social structure. The study sheds light on the relationship between social and digital inequality, and challenges the psychological and individualistic bias in contemporary research on news media use.
Surging in popularity, news literacy has tended to centre on an understanding of journalistic content and its importance for preserving democratic life. What typically receive less attention are the political, economic and cultural contexts in which news is produced. A focus on content is warranted, but examination of the institutions and structure of news media systems also is essential for developing a full appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of news content. Drawing on literature in media literacy, political economy of media, and media sociology, this paper argues for a context-centred approach to the critical analysis of news content as well as its production and consumption.
Journalism and Political Exclusion: Social Conditions of News Production and Reception
Canadian Journal of Communication, 2016
In Journalism and Political Exclusion: Social Conditions of News Production and Reception, author Debra M. Clarke critiques the paradox of information poverty in an age of information wealth. Clarke flips the notion of "news publics" on its head and instead posits that there is no true democratic public. Instead, there are news publics constrained by the social conditions of production: limited resources, limited news value criteria, and limited expression for fear of legal repercussion (pp. 145-147). The underrepresentation of a diversity of views in mainstream media can therefore explain the false notion that an increase in media access correlates with an increase in democracy. The author opts to focus her analysis on the social conditions that render political engagement by marginalized communities muted. She concludes that the ironic "journalism-democracy relationship envisioned by neoliberalism" (p. 266) has been refuted by its own politicoideological constraints. Major social groups are already excluded from democratic publics due to structural inequalities (p. 20), and journalism can be seen to contribute to this exclusion. Clarke, associate professor of sociology at Trent University, embarks on an extensive study to question how the exclusion of representative groups from information publics reifies dominant discourses in news production. She achieves this through an empirical study of news media reception and critical engagement with the literature. Clarke's notable contribution to the literature is her empirical study on news reception. The longitudinal study (2001-2007) of 188 Canadian news consumers challenges journalism's political inclusivity and undresses the fallacy of increased access via "new media" by revealing the consistent connections between new media and the media of old (the press, television, and radio). What, then, is "new media" to the politically engaged, other than old media packaged differently? The author also offers a critical analysis of the "contemporary social conditions of news production" (p. 9), which serves as commentary on journalism practice. Clarke therefore touches on key concepts in communication theory at the core of political exclusion. For example, she examines how professional journalism as a medium encourages political engagement (p. 226-228). Further, she considers how textual analysis can be better understood beyond communication theory (pp. 104-105, referring to Hall, 1980). The key themes of Clarke's book include what news publics are perceived to be, what news publics are in reality, who can participate and on what basis, and what the implications are for media democracy. Clarke debunks popular myths about news media, such as its mandate to facilitate political involvement. The structure of sociopolitical engagement as co-opted by the narrative news genre has more of a delimiting than an empowering effect. This is in part due to market demands and mass media ownership. The recentring of political views overwhelmingly shared by the state and
‘It’s Something Posh People Do’: Digital Distinction in Young People’s Cross-Media News Engagement
Media and Communication, 2018
In this article, I analyse digital distinction mechanisms in young people’s cross media engagement with news. Using a combination of open online diaries and qualitative interviews with young Danes aged 15 to 18 who differ in social background and education, and with Bourdieu’s field theory as an analytical framework, the article investigates how cultural capital (CC) operates in specific tastes and distastes for news genres, platforms and providers. The article argues that distinction mechanism not only works on the level of news providers and news genres but also on the level of engagement practices—the ways in which people enact and describe their own news engagement practices. Among those rich in CC, physical, analogue objects in the form of newspapers and physical conversations about news are seen as ‘better’ that digital ones, resulting in a feeling of guilt when they mostly engage with news on social media. Secondly, young people with lower CC discard legacy news, which they s...
Young people and daily life contexts of news appropriation
This article analyses the news social cir- culation in the private sphere, using a sample of thirty-two young Portuguese people interviewed because they showed some form of civic participation of diffe- rent types and intensities. Through news consumption and political information, we identi ed ve pro les: Informed Con- sumers, Poorly Informed Consumers, Emergent Consumers of Information, Consumers in a Self-Project, and Online Consumers. These pro les revealed the signi cance of social and civic capitals, the importance of daily life and family environments in the habits of news con- sumption and an important connection to the family with the political news.
Grey Collar Journalism: The Social Relations of News Production
"PhD Thesis, School of Social Sciences and Liberal Studies, Charles Sturt University. "On any meaningful notion of 'class' as a concept related to the social relations deriving from the system of production in a Capitalist society like ours, journalists are not 'middle class' ... they are not particularly well paid, their union and their industrial actions are, for all intents and purposes, the same as any other group of unionists." Keith Windschuttle 1998, p.351 The purpose of my Doctoral thesis - Grey Collar Journalism: The social relations of news production - is to analyse the role of journalists as public intellectuals (Louw 2001) and to do so from an understanding of newswork as a labour process. Along the way I have developed a critical appraisal of various theoretical approaches to the study of journalism. Broadly speaking this thesis is in the discipline of the sociology of journalism, but it is without question a crossdisciplinary thesis and necessarily so. In the first three chapters I develop and explain what I mean by Grey Collar Journalism and the 'journalist-as-intellectual'. This section of the thesis articulates what I call the 'labour theory of journalism' to further explain the ambivalent nature (Hallin 1994; Franklin 1997) of modern journalism. I argue here that this ambivalence in modern journalism is reflected in the contradictory relationship between grey collar newsworkers and the Nation-State. This is expressed through what I have called the 'emotional dialectic' of newswork and the 'dialectic of the front-page'. It is this labour theory of journalism that brings forth the concept of the grey collar journalists, which I define as a cohort of newsworkers who occupy a contradictory class location - broadly speaking the 'new middle class' to which the category of 'newsworker' belongs (Callinicos 1989b). Grey collar journalists are also public intellectuals in the Gramscian sense of being the producers and circulators of various ideas in civil society - snippets of ideology and social science - in the service of either of the major contending classes: Labour and Capital. The labour theory of journalism is then employed in a study of Australian political journalism to identify the social forces that create the conditions in which grey collar journalists operate. These are defined and analysed as the economic, class, cultural, political, historical and social relations of production that underpin the contradictory and ambivalent "emotional attitudes" (Orwell 1988, p.9) of newsworkers. In the next few chapters, Australian examples are illustrated in order to critically examine the highly politicised and culturally-mystified relationship between journalism as a set of social practices and the important centres of power in a monopoly capitalist society - in principal the ruling class and the state apparatus. This development of the grey collar thesis grounds a class-based critique of the liberal-democratic theory of the media as 'Fourth Estate'. In particular, I critically discuss changes to the MEAA Code of Ethics that were accepted in 1998, after lengthy debate in the union's ranks and in the media. The final chapters of the thesis test the explanatory power of the grey collar thesis against recent attempts to theorise journalism from a cultural studies perspective and the so-called 'media wars' debates of the late 1990s. In particular I challenge John Hartley's assertion that we are now in the age of postmodern journalism."
Media Power and Class Power: Overplaying Ideology
2002
The media have a contradictory role in relation to class power. They do predominantly carry corporate and state friendly messages, but not exclusively. They do have a role in legitimating capitalist social relations, but the role of ideology in maintaining social order has been overplayed by some theorists. A variety of other mechanisms employed by the powerful to pursue their interests are arguably as important as the mass media in the maintenance of 'ruling ideas'. In attempting to rethink the relationship between media power and class power, this essay uses the work of Stuart Hall as the starting point for a critique of cultural and media studies. It argues that Critical Theorists such as Hall overemphasized the importance of ideology and the 'function' of the media in capitalist social order.