Pierre Bourdieu, who died recently, is important to scholars of political communication because of his work during the past ten years. His recent reflections on the role of the communication media in political life resulted in the publication of two papers, “L´emprise du Jornalisme” and “Sur la Telévision.” These were transcripts of an unusual political experiment in television broadcasting. Bourdieu delivered two lectures at the Colège de France in Paris, where he had held the chair in sociology since 1981. The lectures were then broadcast to the public on the Paris Première station, reaching beyond his usual audience. The broadcasts made no compromises with the medium of television: the professor spoke on a plain background, and there were no image bites or other effects added to make the lecture more entertaining.

The lectures, issued in English in 1996 under the title, On Television (Trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. New York: New Press), are an important theoretical document on the relationships among press, politics, and public life. The lectures caused such a firestorm of controversy in France that Bourdieu wrote a response, which appears as a preface in the book. To this was added a final chapter, “The Power of Journalism,” which gives a more-formal, detailed presentation of the ideas from the television lecture, along with an appendix containing an abridged article, “The Olympics—An Agenda for Analysis,” both of which had been published in the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales.

Journalism’s Power

Bourdieu's concern is with the power journalists wield over politics as a result of their central role in the creation of symbolic capital. Politicians no longer can do their work autonomously (and neither can scholars, poets, and other experts), but must respond to the demands of journalism. The journalistic field is not an autonomous one, in part because journalists do not have a system of internal control (such as peer review). Instead, the journalistic field is heteronomous, that is, losing control from within and becoming subject to external forces, especially the commercial pressures in a consolidating and globalizing industry.

The danger in the current state of political communication is what Bourdieu calls "symbolic violence," which occurs internally as journalists become involved in self-censorship without realizing it and which occurs externally as the news industries produce conditions of what Bourdieu considers demagoguery. These result from the capacity of television images to produce a "reality effect": "The news, the incidents and accidents of everyday life, can be loaded with political or ethnic significance liable to unleash strong, often negative feelings, such as racism, chauvinism, the fear-hatred of the foreigner or xenophobia" (p. 21).

Bourdieu concludes that the structures of television news pose "a serious problem for democratic practice" (p. 33). Journalists shape the news by selecting sources, arranging the set, laying the ground rules that make interactions pre-scripted, and approach topics according to unconscious categories and assumptions. The pressures to say something new every day inevitably create a series of crises, disasters, and revolutions, always viewed acritically. Newspapers and other media outlets are also influenced by these qualities of television news, and as a result, Bourdieu suggests, the journalistic field creates a reality that crowds politicians and citizens out of the common public space.

He is pointedly skeptical of public opinion polling, which he says sidesteps the collective efforts to participate in public life, which occur, for example, in political parties and labor unions. On this topic, see the separate comment by Susan Herbst.

Recommendations

Bourdieu’s recommendations in the face of the problems he identifies are, he freely admits, utopian: that journalists resist the competition for the scoop and that they set aside the race for ratings. These are moral and ethical solutions to structural weakness, and they reflect the longstanding liberal bromide that what is needed to guarantee a free and responsible press is for journalists to provide more thoughtful analysis and interpretation of events, "in a context which makes them meaningful," to quote from the 1947 U.S. Hutchins Commission report. He also suggests that his call for morality among journalists be backed up with structural changes that encourage, support, and reward autonomous self-regulation of the journalistic field, although he doesn’t specify what these might be.

The obvious problem with moralistic or ethical calls for greater analysis and contextual detail in news is that they run contrary to the structures of the news business, such as the pace of work routines. In France, where the news media are more or less influenced or subsidized by the ministry of communication, Bourdieu’s solution can be seen as itself a moral stand meant to influence not only journalists but also the government entities that intervene in the operations of the news media. Under the U.S. system, as journalists have attempted to respond to the widespread demand for a socially responsible press, they have provided more and more interpretation. In our 1997 examination of newspaper content, Diana Mutz and I measured these changes, and subsequent research on television newscasts, National Public Radio news programming, and Internet news sites showed that the shift away from event-centered reporting and toward interpretation has been widespread. These studies are available on line at the New Long Journalism Web site: http://tigger.uic.edu/~kgbcomm/longnews/

The changes in news have had several unanticipated consequences. When journalists try to explain the meaning of events, in addition to reporting what happened, they cover fewer events, leaving larger holes in what Gaye Tuchman called the net for capturing news. The time constraints of daily journalism, as well as the lack of staff, low pay, and other conditions of labor, cannot accommodate greater explanatory work otherwise. Work conditions also contribute to the fact that the interpretations that journalists provide are usually of the most generic kind. Explanations on the fly must always remain superficial. Especially on television news, the result is that news stories interlace journalists' judgments about events into factual accounts. In newspapers and on public radio, what passes for explanatory news overwhelmingly relies on obvious, safe, and politically centrist interpretive schemes. Politics then becomes bland and uninteresting and must be spiced up by visual gimmicks, by prurient and horse-race themes, and by insider or personality coverage angles. These are not, however, the most important consequences of the rise of the new long journalism.

Longer, more analytical news also shifts the role of journalists from the reporters of events to the explainers of their meaning in social and political life. This is the symbolic power that Bourdieu considers threatening. All cultural producers, including not only artists and philosophers but scientists, have seen a progressive loss of autonomy, which he considers essential for creative discovery, as they have become increasingly subject to journalism. Here the heteronomy of journalism becomes a central concern: journalists wield greater cultural power but under ever-greater pressures from the market.

Infrastructure Proposal

My current project on the decline of fact and rise of interpretation in U.S. journalism has pointed to one simple step that could provide a structural support to sustain better journalism: regular measurements of actually existing reporting.

Journalists and news organizations in the United States now have very limited information about what they do. There are market-driven measurements, such as circulation figures and audience ratings, but these are developed and maintained with little attention to the actual content and form of the news. They demand that journalists divine the relationship between content decisions and audience changes. Besides these, there are no systematic measurements of the news available to news media, which would allow editors to compare their work to others. The assortment of prizes, and even the sporadic calls and letters (or e-mails) from the audience, provide responses only to the exceptional content, not to the run of daily reporting.

In our 1997 study, Diana Mutz and I developed a way to assess the who, what, when, where, how, and why of daily news reports and used it to track changes in news over 100 years, a method that has proved reliable for other media as well. The studies show some surprising changes, besides the movement in the who away from individual actors (in favor of groups and officialdom), the when of reporting has focused on prediction (always a tricky business, but especially so in daily journalism), and the where has shifted away from the most local places. The Internet appears to have had some influence on restoring local coverage, but otherwise the shift away from event-centered coverage has been continual. Journalists are fascinated by these results and would like to know how their own newspaper or newscast compares.

As news becomes increasingly mixed with opinion on television and includes fewer events in newspapers, a system of content ratings would offer the best window on news, the sort of clear picture journalists need so that they can self-regulate, as Bourdieu proposed.

Kevin G. Barnhurst, editor of the newsletter for 2000-02, and associate professor, Department of Communication, University of Illinois, Chicago, is working on a book on the decline of fact and rise of opinion in U.S. journalism. Write him at Department of Communication (MC-132), 1007 W. Harrison St. BSB 1148A, University of Illinois–Chicago, IL 60607-7137, or send e-mail: kgbcomm@uic.edu