Abstract
This paper explores the discourses of popular legitimacy deployed by New Zealand journalists. It studies in particular the ways that journalists reflect upon their relationship with “the people”, through their comments in such forums as trade publications, addresses to readers in the voice of the editor and memoirs. It argues that the dominant journalistic voices in Aotearoa New Zealand provide a narrow and poorly defined set of resources to describe how journalism practice relates to those outside the elite spaces of most public debate or to describe the grounds of journalists’ legitimacy as a set of spokespeople for society. Discourses of “the people” are marked by a discomfort with the category and are rarely politicized, when they are not elided away under competing terms such as community or public. The paper argues that the weakness of a sense of popular legitimacy has consequences for the quality of both journalism and of political and cultural debate in the country.
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