DIVISIONS AND STRUGGLES OF THE SLOVENIAN JOURNALISTIC GUILD

Abstract

Recent government attempts to control and censor the media in Slovenia met with considerable resistance from the general public and journalists themselves. However, since resistant journalists organised themselves in the manner of a guild, relying on classical journalistic ethics as their basic ideological principle, their resistance, in our opinion, proved to be short sighted and not sufficiently socially conscious. In this article we attempt, using recent developments in Slovenian journalism as an example, to analyse the structural changes in the social status and functions of European journalism in relation to other areas of “linguistic production”. Given the recent global changes of linguistic production and the capitalist mode of production in general, the guild organisation of journalists and classical journalistic ethics, which both still prevail in theory and practice of European journalism, begin to look problematic, since they fail to take account of newly emerged class divisions between contract-employed and freelance journalists. Even more, by being blind to this class division, “guild and ethics” type of thinking and acting even reproduces it.