Abstract:News is a cultural form no less than it is an organizational product, an economic
commodity or a political institution. Summarizing the role of culture in the making
of news, Michael Schudson (2007...News is a cultural form no less than it is an organizational product, an economic
commodity or a political institution. Summarizing the role of culture in the making
of news, Michael Schudson (2007: 254) wrote that ‘journalists handle the anarchy
of events by depending on available cultural resources, the treasure house of tropes,
narrative forms, resonant mythic forms and frames of their culture. They assimilate the
new, apparently novel, unique, unprecedented event to the familiar old ways of understanding the world.’ To Schudson’s list of cultural resources we must certainly add the
concepts of media ritual and public memory. The goal of this chapter, however, is not
to log a comprehensive inventory of the cultural resources employed by journalists but
rather to highlight a few of the key issues encountered in the scholarship on news as
a cultural form.
The culturological approach, as Schudson (1989) once tagged the perspective on
news taken here, is now common in journalism studies. James W. Carey’s call for a
ritual view of communication which has been particularly inuential among scholars
in the United States has helped motivate development of theoretical alternatives
to the transmission view that emphasizes the social psychology of media effects. ‘If
the archetypal case of communication under a transmission view is the extension of
messages across geography for the purpose of control,’ Carey wrote (1989 [1975]: 18),
‘the archetypal case under a ritual view is the sacred ceremony that draws persons
together in fellowship and communality.’ A generation of scholars has both elaborated
and critiqued this Durkheimian-inflected celebration of ‘communion, community,
and communication.’ The result is a theoretically sophisticated body of literature that
simultaneously challenges and complements media effects research. Of course this
is not say that all – or for that matter any – of the key conceptual issues are settled.
Indeed this scholarship can be characterized in terms of interlocking conceptual
tensions with which cultural and critical analysts of journalism must grapple. We
begin with the notion of ‘cultural resources’ itself which, given its emphasis on
maintenance of society in time, stands in tension with processes of cultural and social
change. This, in turn, suggests other tensions to be explored such as the universally
human versus the politically contingent.Read More
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-10-20
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 8
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