Boundaries of Journalism

Professionalism, Practices and Participation

Matt Carlson, Seth C. Lewis, Matt Carlson, Seth C. Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317540656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The concept of boundaries has become a central theme in the study of journalism. In recent years, the decline of legacy news organizations and the rise of new interactive media tools have thrust such questions as "what is journalism" and "who is a journalist" into the limelight.

Struggles over journalism are often struggles over boundaries. These symbolic contests for control over definition also mark a material struggle over resources. In short: boundaries have consequences. Yet there is a lack of conceptual cohesiveness in what scholars mean by the term "boundaries" or in how we should think about specific boundaries of journalism.

This book addresses boundaries head-on by bringing together a global array of authors asking similar questions about boundaries and journalism from a diverse range of perspectives, methodologies, and theoretical backgrounds.

Boundaries of Journalism assembles the most current research on this topic in one place, thus providing a touchstone for future research within communication, media and journalism studies on journalism and its boundaries.

PART II Encountering non-journalistic actors in newsmaking

Chapter 8 Journalism beyond the boundaries The collective construction of news narratives

DOI: 10.4324/9781315727684-16

David Domingo

Florence Le Cam

Introduction

On May 31, 2012, the police were not surprised when a crowd of dozens of young Muslims gathered in front of the commissary of Molenbeek, a northwest Brussels neighborhood with a majority of Muslim inhabitants, shouting angry slogans. They had been convened through mobile text messages that claimed that a woman wearing a niqab had been forced to take off the traditional clothing in front of policemen at the commissary, after refusing to show her face when confronted in the street by a patrol. Wearing an integral veil has been forbidden by law in Belgium since 2011. The police had been tipped off about the demonstration, and even if the chief of police had no doubts about the correctness of the detention proceedings and considered the rumors in the text messages unfounded, he ordered a security cordon around the commissary. The mayor of the municipality did not hesitate to be there that evening during the protest, not only to try to calm the angry mob of young people that threw rocks at the building, but also to give the journalists present on the scene the first elements of an interpretation of what had happened, in order to make sure they framed the demonstration as a disproportionate reaction to a minor incident. The next day, as protests repeated in the evening under the searchlight of the police helicopter despite a curfew, the mayor decided to use a different channel than mainstream journalism to calm the community: he called the imams to a meeting so that they could explain to their congregations in the mosques that he would not let a minority of radicals ruin the image of a municipality that had been praised for its efforts to foster multicultural respect.

Analyzing the boundary work that professional journalists engage in, as chapters in the previous section do, is crucial to understanding how they are adapting to a scenario full of uncertainty.¹ In this chapter, though, we want to expand the exploration to a wider scenario that includes the daily interactions of a plurality of actors that participates with (and sometimes without) the journalists in a collective construction of news narratives about current events. Research tends to categorize these other actors as sources and audiences, already setting them on the other side of the journalism boundary, ² even though such boundaries are blurrier than ever.³ We believe that in order to achieve a better understanding of how news is being produced, circulated and used today, we need to de-emphasize the attention on the contours of professional boundaries. To this aim, instead of exploring the boundaries around journalistic identities, we propose focusing on the diversity of actors playing a role in news narratives, and in doing so we want to highlight the boundaries of news practices. We examine actors who engage in the construction of news narratives, regardless of their position inside or outside journalism as a profession. We prefer to conceptualize journalism as a social practice, defined by the activities that are necessary for the creation of news, rather than by institutionalized structures and professional positions. From this perspective, we may not prejudge a priori what the role is of each actor in making news, or distinguish some practices as legitimate journalism and others as irrelevant just because they are not performed by professional journalists or by professional media. Our hypothesis is that journalism as a practice is “in dispersion,”⁴ that the professional boundaries of journalism represent only one of its configurations, historically and symbolically constructed. Other social actors outside institutionalized journalistic organizations are also actively participating in the co-construction of news. In doing so, they extend the meaning of what we should consider as part of the social activity of making the news. The mayor of Molenbeek talking to the imams to reach a public that does not consume mainstream media is a good example of relevant practices we may be missing if we focus solely on the professional boundaries of journalism.

Tracing news practices allows us to pose a different set of questions regarding contemporary journalism. We can ask whether diverse actors reproduce similar strategies in their production and circulation of newsworthy materials, and to what extent professional products are a model to imitate or not. We can explore the emergence of new narrative forms proposed by specific actors and how others adapt to these innovations. Again, to know whether this happens inside or outside of the newsrooms would be an empirical finding: if we did not look at all the actors involved in sharing discourses about issues of collective interest, we would be missing part of the picture of what is journalism. We can still interrogate the relationships between the actors and what roles they assign to themselves and to others implicitly through their interactions and explicitly through the representations they enunciate in research interviews. The boundaries of news practices are likely to be more unstable, and therefore more intriguing, than those of the profession. In this context, professional affiliation is just one factor among others to be traced in order to explain who engages with journalism and how. Moreover, the variety of news practices and the actors performing them may change as every new controversy may motivate new players to enter the public space to contribute to the collective news narrative. By focusing on the preservation of professional boundaries, we would risk erasing the complexity of the construction of news, the strong role that many other actors besides professional journalists may have in the shaping of the narratives about a specific event.

This chapter is the result of a dialogue between two researchers sharing the same fieldwork to test this hypothesis by applying the theoretical background each of them feels more comfortable with. First, we discuss how actor-network theory ⁵ allows us to approach news practices without defining any boundaries and invites us to trace how the interactions between actors shape their actions. It is through their relationships that we can make sense of how they co-create news narratives, what is the position of professional journalism in the process, and what role professional boundary work plays in configuring the network of relationships. Second, we present the perspective of dialogism, ⁶ which suggests that every discursive practice has embedded in itself previous discourses and future discourses. The news narrative, then, is the fragile result of a polyphonic and dialogic discursive interaction between the various actors. In their actions and attitudes, actors produce specific, diverse narratives, stemming from the knowledge they have about the strategies, practices, and discourses of other actors, as well as their anticipation of discourses that can affect their own speeches and those of others. Boundaries are symbolically understood and eventually known, but they continuously move according to the discourses produced.

The Djato controversy

The day after the detention of the veiled lady, journalists managed to discover her name and her background: Stéphanie Djato was a Belgian recently converted to Islam and was involved with the Salafist group Sharia4Belgium that wanted to impose Islamic laws in the country. The group was behind the demonstrations and had actually brought many participants from their headquarters in Antwerp. On the evening of June 1, Sharia4Belgium convened a press conference in which its leader and the woman in niqab gave their version of events and called for revenge. Every actor knew that the topic was very touchy, mixing radical extremism, multiculturalism and an electoral context with municipal elections approaching in few months. A controversy was deemed sure to arise.

Controversies ⁷ are a unique opportunity for researchers, the best moment to make sense of the mechanisms of the collective construction of news.⁸ Actors feel the urge to position themselves in the wake of events that resonate with their social principles or political goals, and their ideas crystallize in discourses that most often reveal existing tensions as their relationships are explicitly laid out for the researcher to examine. Selecting a specific controversy, like the Djato case, also makes the discussion of news practices with the diversity of social actors more tangible, and the reconstruction of the process of production and circulation of information about the event allows one to trace the interconnectedness of the actions and discourses involved in the process.

We took as a strategic point of departure the news published by mainstream media (French-speaking national and local newspapers and the public television) in order to identify the sources used by journalists to cover the incident.⁹ This sample was not only convenient, but also significant in order to know what narratives had been produced by those formerly known as the chroniclers of history. Our focus being on tracing the participation of all the social actors, not just the journalists, in the construction of the collective news narrative, taking the professionals’ production as the starting point may sound paradoxical, but it seemed the most reasonab...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• Boundaries of Journalism
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1Professionalism, norms and boundaries
• 2Encountering non-journalistic actors in newsmaking