The Discursive Construction of Journalistic Transparency

Abstract

Drawing on Bourdieu's field theory, this study explores how journalistic doxa and cultural capital come to be discursively formed. The study culls references to journalistic transparency from a broad range of US journalism trade publications and sites from 1997 to 2015 in order to examine the discursive construction of transparency within the journalistic field. The analysis focuses on what members of the journalistic field in the United States mean by transparency and how transparency is or is not discursively legitimized. Implications for field theory are considered.