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Abstract
The author discusses the utility of sociology's new institutionalism (NI) in organizational theory for the study of journalism and contends that NI remedies the political and cultural deficits in most existing social theories of the news. By highlighting how news organizations and journalists are embedded in broader fields of news producers and also politics, NI reveals both the limits and possibilities that journalism confronts as it works to fulfill its ideal role in democratic society. This article explicates one version of NI's applicability to media studies by focusing on how journalism is entangled in the conflicts and values of the “political field,” beyond the more limited domain of journalism proper. It then considers the relevance of this theory for explaining turn-of-the-20th-century transformations in journalism. Between 1865 and 1920, the American press redefined its highest ideals as well as its most mundane organizational practices. It changed from an avidly partisan press to a sober “objective” media. NI helps highlight how these transformations in journalism's mission reflected and refracted more overarching shifts in the American political system.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, New Orleans, January 2004. I wish to thank John Mohr, Rod Benson, and David Ryfe for their criticism and advice in preparing this article.
Notes
1. The production of culture theory of the news suggests that culture and its contents must not be understood in abstraction from the organizations, social roles, routines, and institutions employed in cultural creation. The specific structure of the division of labor and the constraints governing the news organization decisively affect the created cultural content. Furthermore, these role systems and institutions reflect a variety of functional and economic necessities. The news organization is largely understood as a functional, technical system operating under the constraints of the market and scarce resources of time and money.
2. Certainly, media analysts have documented the influence of the political field and its array of forces on the definition of the news. Most prominently, CitationW. Lance Bennett (1990) points to the way dominant, legitimate, organized political groups influence the range of views presented in mainstream media. In his “indexing hypothesis,” he demonstrates how the news duplicates the limited conflict between the two parties. This research is congruent with CitationDaniel Hallin's (1989) analysis of Vietnam War news reporting. For Hallin, American war coverage largely tracked the perspective of the administration. Negative war news appeared only after societal elites and their party representatives split over the conduct of the war. In a similar manner, CitationMolotch and Lester (1974) have posited that the news, far from publicizing unadorned facts, reflects issues first made into matters of public attention by the conflict of political forces. Other media research, notably the investigations of CitationLeon Sigal (1986) and CitationDaniel Hallin (1993), documents the power of legitimate political officials to frame the news through their dominance as news sources.
3. Although both Benson and Cook point to this need for a “mandate,” or strategic rituals of legitimation, they fail to pursue this insight. They do not consider the consequences of this need for political justification upon the enterprise of journalism itself. They bluntly assume the press possesses a public mandate or can contrive a legitimation without considering how this implicates journalism in the political field and without recognizing how journalism adopts the cultural symbols and meanings dominant in the public sphere to justify itself and define its mission. While CitationBenson (1999) and Bourdieu focus on the competition internal to the journalistic field over who are the most legitimate practitioners, I would argue that this internal struggle is accompanied by an external struggle; journalists contend with other public speakers over who possesses the right to make authoritative pronouncements about our social world.