The Rules of the Journalistic Field

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu's recent research on the media offers a valuable although somewhat inconsistent appraisal of what he describes as the `journalistic field'. The French sociologist applies his main conceptual tools to the media — and more particularly to television — in order to shed light on hidden forms of domination and symbolic violence exercised by television. He emphasizes that market journalism has become a threat to the autonomy of fields endowed with specific rules and capital, such as the academic and the political fields. Bourdieu insists that it is this process that endangers democracy. This article proposes a critical assessment of Bourdieu's sociology of television. Despite a generally sympathetic account, it stresses the epistemological weakness of his work and argues that it is difficult to understand the recent evolution of the French journalistic field — Bourdieu's main case study — without paying more attention to the impact of the political field on the media than Bourdieu does. While ultimately welcoming his stimulating analysis of the overlapping of the political, academic and journalistic fields, the article stresses that Bourdieu's negative diagnosis of television is largely to be explained by his erroneous tackling of `journalists' as a homogeneous category.