Working Knowledge Encounters: Academics, Journalists and the Conditions of Cultural Labour

Abstract

This article is concerned with how the contemporary media process and disseminate specialist knowledge through an analysis of the increasing interaction between universities and the media. The burgeoning “promotional culture” of the former and the “content hunger” of the latter are encouraging closer, regular interactions between two largely distinct categories of “knowledge worker”—journalists and academics. A qualitative study of their encounters is reported here in seeking to understand the ways in which these macro-structural trends are played out at the “coalface” of cultural labour. It is observed that these micro-encounters exhibit a clear inequality of discursive power in favour of journalists, who are well positioned to select, reject or otherwise discipline academic language and discourse. In conclusion, it is proposed that, from the evidence of this case study, discursive “equity” in the media is elusive, even where there is relative parity of cultural labour power.

Keywords:

• Cultural labour
• knowledge
• universities
• academics
• public sphere

The author would like to thank Peter Wejbora and Ruth Sibson for their research assistance, and Colin Sparks and Toby Miller for providing academic advice and strategic assistance with both research projects. The author also thanks the busy working people who acquiesced to one more call on their scarce free time. Finally, thanks to the anonymous reviewer of this article for some very helpful suggestions.

The University of Newcastle, Australia

Notes

1. This article is based on a University of Newcastle Research Management Committee-funded project, “When the Ivory Tower Meets the Fourth Estate: Academics and Journalists as Cultural Workers in the Contemporary Public Sphere”, and “Disposing of the Tabloid? A Critical Analysis of Contemporary Developments in the Print Media”, funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.

2. For many years I have had consistent contact with the news media, not only as a researcher, but also as a frequent “commentator” in a range of media—as a feature and “op-ed” writer for newspapers, a “talkback” and “expert” guest on radio, a quoted source in newspapers and magazines, and a provider of background information to television, radio, newspaper and magazine journalists. This relationship with the news and current affairs media has been both initiated by journalists and by myself through press releases issued by the university. While I have willingly accepted this role (sometimes called that of the “public intellectual”—a concept and subject of debate that is not discussed here), not least because of its research and pedagogical uses, it has produced some personal and professional uneasiness that stimulated this inquiry.

3. While it is acknowledged that there is some dual membership of, and passage between, these occupational categories, they are largely distinct in terms of personnel and function. No interview subject disputed the integrity of the distinction, and all routinely used it in the interviews.

4. I am not arguing here that an ultimate balance and objectivity is possible in the news media—or, indeed, in academe. However, those who critique, justifiably, naïve conceptions of value-free knowledge, can imply, reductio ad absurdum, that all regimes of knowledge work in similar ways, on equivalent epistemological bases and with ultimately equivalent truth claims. In this article, while making no developed case for the objectivity of knowledge provided by universities, I am emphasising an important feature of academic discourse that displays organised scepticism, the consideration and weighting of differing viewpoints, an appeal to logic and evidence, and a resistance to the strategic closure of intellectual inquiry.

5. A sample of 32 full-time university academics (all in the humanities and social sciences) and journalists (print and broadcast, broadsheet and tabloid) was interviewed using a semi-structured format in Australia, Britain and the USA. All names of interviewees and their organisations are disguised by agreement in order to encourage candour. Transcribed material is verbatim, apart from minor conversational repetitions and phatic utterances (such as “um”, “er” and serially repeated “you knows”). Edited passages, where extraneous material has been excised, are marked by signs of deletion/elision (…). Omissions and implications are indicated by placement in square brackets […].

6. The broadsheet-tabloid divide is, it must be noted, by no means absolute (Sparks and Tulloch 2000), with many broadsheet newspapers now deploying devices usually associated with the tabloid (e.g. large images, short stories and greater space for sport and entertainment). It is now being further problematised by the shift of major broadsheet newspapers, such as The Independent and The Times in the United Kingdom, to a tabloid format; the routine use of tabloid sections in broadsheet newspapers (including Daniel's), and the growing popularity of the “midi” or “Berliner” format, like France's Le Monde and Germany's Berliner Zeitung. The tabloid is, therefore, rather more than a technical term for newspaper size, and now extends to the broadcast and online media. There is no doubt, however, both inside and outside the media industries, as evidenced by over 60 interviews conducted in the two research projects drawn upon in this article, that a strong, working (although variable) conception of the tabloid is commonly held.