Broadcast Journalism and the Challenge Of Being “Here,” “There,” and “Everywhere”

• In Event: 3267 - Section on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 2. News Media & Society

Abstract

That news has the unique ability to both represent something of the truth of distant happenings and to aid others’ ability to get in touch, however indirectly, with the truth of those happenings is something that social scientists have long noted as being true about news. Importantly, it is also this same feature of news which, according to scholars of early news-making, catalyzed its integration into modern life. While the mediating/mediated character of news is, thus, something of a well-established social scientific fact, it also remains, in important respects, an under-appreciated and often overlooked aspect of news-making. This is especially the case within sociological research on journalism, where even though news’ connected and connecting character is widely acknowledged by scholars within the field, it is simultaneously rendered something of an impossibility, insofar as news is typically seen as being determined either by: (1) the concerns of journalists’ sources, (2) the demands of their audiences, or (3) the values and organizational needs of journalists themselves. The picture that, thus, emerges of news is that rather than it being a uniquely inter-worldly phenomenon, it is a rather unremarkable product of intra-worldly interests and/or worldviews. Drawing on six-months-worth of fieldwork at German broadcaster ZDF, we argue that in order to understand how and why news comes to take the shape it does, it must be seen as a product born out of journalists need to be simultaneously “here” (within their own world of journalism), “there” (within the world of their sources), and “everywhere” (within some more transcendent public being).

Authors

• Matthew J. Mahler, Yale University

• Mirco Liefke, Goethe University