What Journalism Could Be by Barbie Zelizer

Author:Barbie Zelizer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509507900
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2017-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

On the Future of Journalism and Cultural Studies

The epistemological uneasiness at the core of journalism and cultural studies’ coexistence is one that asserts itself whenever dissimilar areas of inquiry come into close contact. The question remains how to engage that uneasiness in a way that maintains the integrity of both journalism and cultural studies.

Since the mid-1990s, we have heard repeated calls to reinvigorate the charter of cultural studies, in both its British and US forms (Frow, 1995; Stratton & Ang, 1996; Wright, 1998; Bennett, 1998; Striphas, 1998; Couldry, 2000; Berube, 2009). They have been accompanied by bids to better address the merger of cultural studies and journalism (Hartley, 1999; Turner, 2000, 2011; Tomaselli, 2002; Deuze, 2005; Harrington, 2012). While, by and large, I have not addressed the lingering problems in journalism education and resistance among journalists aspiring to professionalism regarding the value of a cultural perspective on the news, the trajectory I trace here suggests that journalism continues to offer a litmus test of sorts regarding the future of cultural studies. Repositioning journalism at the forefront of cultural studies inquiry could help cultural studies on its own road to academic maturation, by which cultural studies might become more of a full-fledged discipline of knowledge, rather than one positioned in opposition to surrounding fields of study.

Nearly thirty years have passed since Meaghan Morris (1988) first voiced her concerns about the banality of cultural studies. Her prediction – that cultural studies would find it hard to resist making similar pronouncements about dissimilar cultural objects simply because the existing analytical template worked so well – seems to have been borne out when thinking about journalism’s neglect. Journalism remains one area of study that can help cultural studies navigate its own middle age with grace and generosity. A re-examination of the tenets of cultural studies might not only accommodate journalism more fully but also serve the mission of cultural studies more effectively.

More than just a difference of perspective keeps journalism and cultural studies at an uncomfortable distance from each other. Cultural studies’ capacity to instantiate itself as a field of knowledge secure in its own claims and in what counts as evidence is key here. Its maturation into a field with sufficient self-knowledge to grow depends on its capacity to expand and include a phenomenon like journalism rather than shrink to keep it outside. There is enough evidence to suggest that it can do so. Even if journalism partly challenges some of cultural studies’ own claims, it also displays an often reluctant recognition of the need to broaden its own boundaries.

It is possible that cultural studies has neglected incorporating journalism at its core because doing so would necessitate a close look at the limitations of cultural inquiry. It may be time, then, for cultural studies to confront the problems embodied by journalism and the limitations such problems suggest for the study of any longstanding inquiry into the real. Recognizing that there is a reality out there and that, in certain quarters, truth and facts

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