How states tighten control: a field theory perspective on journalism in contemporary Crimea

This article contributes to denationalizing Bourdieu’s field theory by analysing the relationship between a regional news media field, the state and transnational influences. The article seeks to answer the question of how a state can impose limits on the autonomy of the news media field during political transition. Field theory is applied to changes that have taken place in Crimean news media since Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in 2014. Drawing on narrative interviews with journalists who worked in Crimea in 2012–17, expert interviews, and secondary sources, I demonstrate how Crimea’s news media field went from being dominated by varied Ukrainian private news media owners to becoming dominated by the Russian state. I show that states can employ direct measures such as anti‐press violence and ownership appropriation of news media outlets in order to increase concentration of state media ownership. In addition, states can reallocate capital in the news media field, disenfranchising some journalists and outlets while favouring others. The adaptive strategies of individual journalists, who, upon losing capital, can sometimes relocate or leave their jobs, also changes the composition of news media fields. Departing from a common view of social spaces as bounded within nation‐states, I examine how the news media field of Crimea has been shaped by both transnational influences, and by the direct imposition of Russian state power through a reconstitution of national borders.     

NGOs,IOs, and the ICC: Diagnosing and Framing Darfur

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have become influential forces in global society. They exert their influence in part by framing issues and thereby suggesting particular courses of action. This article examines how NGOs with distinct missions represent mass violence for the case of Darfur. Content analysis of reports, speeches, and other documents from Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Save Darfur reveals distinct patterns across organizations. In addition to the organizations' specialized fields, interventions by external actors such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court affect NGO framing, but they do so in organization‐specific ways. Against presumptions of a uniform Western position on Darfur, this analysis documents that depictions of violence by Western NGOs show field‐specific patterns and distinct responses to international political and judicial interventions.     

'Sod off and find us a boffin': journalists and the social science conference

Social scientists perform a multi-functional role as researcher, teacher and expert. The academic conference provides an opportunity for all these roles to be engaged and as such is a political and social site where meaning is debated and new research born. The conference is also attractive to journalists as news fodder. This article considers the relationship between journalists and social scientific organizations in the context of a professional conference and seeks to explain the tensions that exist. It concludes that the two cultures of journalist and academic are in conflict where they converge.     

Studying the Sociology of Journalists: The Journalistic Field and the News World

This article makes a case for a socially situated and theoretically sophisticated approach to the sociological study of journalists. This is urgently needed for us to understand the increasingly complex news production environment and the rapidly evolving nature of journalistic practice. Two theoretical approaches to studying the sociology of journalists are outlined and discussed. The first is a development of Pierre Bourdieu's field theory; the second – the ‘news world’ approach – emerges from the social worlds approach commonly associated with Howard S. Becker. Each approach on its own shows considerable promise for the analysis of the increasingly complex news media environment. The article concludes that the journalistic field and the news world approaches could be combined to create a new framework for the sociological study of journalism that would provide a way forward for the important empirical research on journalists that is now needed.     

The pivotal role of news agencies in the context of globalization: a historical approach

The global media play a fundamental role in contemporary globalization, making possible instant communication and promoting an experience of global connectedness. The globalization of media communications has deeply shaped the modern journalistic field in the last 150 years and, at the same time, global news organizations have been instrumental in creating the very conditions that have made globalization possible. In this article I explore the relationship between globalization and the media and trace the historical development of the field of global news, examining in detail the role and trajectories of its most important players, the global news agencies, and highlighting significant parallels between nineteenth‐century globalization and the processes that have led to increased global connectedness in the past decades. I also devote some attention to the more recent developments in the field of global news and the appearance of new types of media organizations.     

Ethnic appeal: A self-defense tool for Kenyan politicians

So far, analyses of apologetic rhetoric strategies as used by individuals or organizations to respond to accusations of wrongdoing have been concentrated in the West. An analysis of political apologia in an African setting – in this case Kenya – reveals that while Kenyan politicians have used denial, victimization, mortification, and counterattacking among other self-defense strategies, one particular strategy emerges as the most commonly used by Kenyan politicians – ethnic appeal.     

Corruptus interruptus: the limits of transactional imaginaries in Moi’s Kenya

This article attempts to unsettle treatments of sovereignty that assume an intrinsic relationship between violence and the law even while critiquing the capacity of the law to ground social order through violence. In such discussions, the police become the embodiment of the force of law without content, especially in totalitarian contexts. In contrast, this article explores other conceptions of the police and by extension, sovereignty, at work in Kenya through an examination of police/citizen interactions at a marked political moment – the end of the 24-year rule of Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi in 2002. Through a particular example of the complicated conviviality that pervades state/society relations in many patrimonial political contexts – in this case between a policeman, a bus driver, and the bus diver’s wife – I attempt to reframe normative conceptions about the police and of enforcement in the context of Kenya’s failing patrimonial economy of circulation and capture in the early 2000s.     

Journalists–sources relationship in violent conflicts coverage: Shifting dynamics

News sources are a major part of news production in times of violent crisis and conflict. They can shape the context in which journalists see and frame the events. The relationship between journalists and their sources during conflicts has received extensive scholarly analysis over the last three decades. This paper addresses the characteristics of this relationship by discussing the power balance between the two sides and presenting a typology of traditional and new news sources used during conflict coverage. Two major trends are concluded: (1) The power dynamics between journalists and news sources during conflict and crisis times are changing and becoming more complex, as sources are more able to influence the news and the boundary between them and journalists are becoming more blurred in today's global digital media environment. (2) New faces and sources are included in news stories, such as terrorists, enemy leaders, and ordinary citizens, enriching the audience with alternative views on the conflict. Although both trends suggest a decrease of dependence on official sources, journalists still rely most on such sources, which maintain some of their control over news flow during conflict.     

Investigating relationships between journalists and public relations practitioners: Working together to set,frame and build the public agenda, 1991–2004

A content analysis of 413 reports of interviews conducted with 418 journalists from 1991 to 2004 grounded in agenda-setting, framing and agenda-building theories found that journalists giving higher estimates of practitioners’ influence on the news reported having better relationships with practitioners. On average, journalists estimated that 44% of the content of news media in the United States is influenced by practitioners. Journalists who were interviewed in 2002–2004 valued public relations more, but expressed love–hate sentiments as much as those interviewed in 1991–1996. Journalists who had worked 18–45 years reported improving relationships with practitioners more often than journalists with 8 or fewer years of experience. Journalists believed good relationships with practitioners are important, but hold practitioners responsible for them.     

Accomplishing Profession through Self‐Mockery

One influential sociological approach to profession has it that a profession is something constructed by social actors themselves and that this work is performed through the swapping of atrocity stories. While atrocity stories are an important resource for constructing profession, they are not the only ones available to social actors. In this article, I draw on field work in an academic engineering research laboratory to document how social actors use self‐mockery to construct profession. They do this in five ways, including through the use of background knowledge to interpret self‐mockery, by reserving self‐mockery for specific conditions separate from conditions where engineering knowledge is put on display, by maintaining a preference for self‐presentations that exclude self‐mockery toward the speaker's self during presentations in lab meetings and lectures in courses, through the selection of locally insignificant selves for mockery, and by assembling their own accounts of self‐mockery.     

Kenya's tourist industry and global production networks: gender,race and inequality

In this article, I consider the position of gender and race in the tourism global production network in Kenya. To address a gap in scholarship on global production networks, I explore the racial and gender characteristics evident in functionally upgraded national tour operators and socially upgraded workers and community members around the Maasai Mara National Reserve. The main findings address the relation of race and gender to disarticulation practices identified in ‘societal’, ‘network’ and ‘territorial’ forms of embeddedness supported by racial and gender representations of skill capabilities and tourist desires. These practices and representations support a production network symbolized by whites, Kenyan‐Asians and expatriates in the highest value segments and jobs, and indigenous African, Maasai and female workers in the lowest value positions. The findings highlight how disarticulation in economic and social upgrading is a gendered and racial process that perpetuates social difference and hierarchy.     

The elephant in the newsroom: Current research on journalism and emotion

The article seeks to review current work on the obvious but complex entanglement of journalism and emotion. The field has been under‐theorized and under‐researched; however, in recent years, the body of studies that attempt to grasp the relationship between journalism, journalists, media content, and emotion is growing. The paper roughly systematizes the literature on journalism and emotion based on the Goffmanian distinction between front region and back region; that is, I consider both research on emotionality of the public outcomes of journalists' work marked by journalists' professional ideology and less visible journalists' emotional labour that is behind media content. Based on the review of the body of research and on a sociological conceptualization of emotions, I identify several blind spots. Most importantly, what is still largely missing from the emergent work is research that complies with the social character of journalists' emotions: acknowledges emotions as a force central to the contemporary networked, dynamic and increasingly precarious journalism work, and conceptualizes emotions in journalism as a sociologically relevant phenomenon articulated by the context including newswork, technologies, and media organizations.     

Who Do You Say That I Am? A History of How Religion Communicators Have Often Avoided “Public Relations”

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Religion Communicators Council members have historically avoided identification with public relations—especially practices associated with Edward Bernays. Council members appear to consider Bernays’ research-based approach evil and manipulative. Instead, religion communicators follow in Ivy Lee's footsteps. The one-time journalist promised to provide honest, accurate news about his clients, not advertising. Comments in council documents have shown that since 1929 members describe themselves more as technicians and in-house journalists who provide news about their organizations than as management-level public relations counsels. These comments reflect Lee's 1905 Declaration of Principles and a public-information approach to public relations.     

Cross‐Movement Coalition Formation: Bridging the Labor‐Environment Divide*

Relations between the labor and environmental movements exist within a complex web of clashing interests, electoral politics, and attempts to form enduring blue‐green coalitions. Unions and other labor organizations are often portrayed as solely interested in economic growth. Environmental organizations are often seen as solely interested in preserving the natural world at the expense of economic growth, thus creating a direct conflict between the interests of labor and environmental organizations. Despite these perceived differences, efforts to bridge the divide between the two movements are increasingly common. This article examines the formation of a collective identity shared by workers and environmentalists participating in the coalition. I develop this argument through an ethnographic analysis of the formation of a blue‐green coalition, the Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow, using in‐depth interviews, observations, and content analyses. I demonstrate how coalition leaders and bridge brokers work to bridge and consolidate the identities of labor and environmental groups to campaign for environmental health regulatory changes in Massachusetts.     

‘Why this story over a hundred others of the day?’ Five journalists’ backstories about writing disability in Toronto

This interview-based study explores the stories behind current disability-based journalism based on the intersubjective experiences of five Toronto journalists whose lives and work intersect with disability. These discussions are divided into salient categories of attitudes, representation, language, framing, gate-keeping, and communication, followed by a list of recommendations on how to pitch disability-based stories to news media. This study uses a dual lens of disability theory and journalism to open a discussion toward further areas of consideration of this apparent gap between journalists and disability-invested organizations/individuals, and to communicate strategies for researchers, allies, and journalists who seek to learn more about how cultural representations of journalism come to exist as they do. Ultimately, participants encourage a shift from dialogue about disability and journalism to a realization that this dialogue is far from oppositional and players in both fields wish to contribute.     

Narrating Nursing Jurisdiction: “Atrocity Stories” and “Boundary‐Work”

Sociologists have long recognized that the division of labor is, at its root, a process of social interaction. Although “negotiations” figure centrally in symbolic interactionist studies of work, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which the structure of workplace talk contributes to the social constitution of occupations. Drawing on the insights of discourse and conversation analysis, this article examines occupational atrocity stories and considers how they accomplish boundary‐work in the hospital setting. I focus on the stories British nurses told about doctors and use data generated in ethnographic research into the routine accomplishment of nursing jurisdiction. I conclude with some general observations about how the detailed analysis of stories and storytelling can contribute to the wider study of social group formation.     

Religious Media Literacy: Toward a Research Agenda

Silk (1995) proposed in Unsecular Media that journalists operate with a limited series of topoi and that these are borrowed from religion. Silk thus claimed when journalists write about religion, they do so in a way that ultimately supports religious values. In this study, I apply topic analysis to recent news coverage of Jesse Jackson's marital infidelity to determine the extent to which the topos of hypocrisy was employed and whether this employment supported or challenged a religious (as opposed to secular) worldview.     

Personalization and the Determination of News

This article addresses the relationship between the construction of news and personal experiences. Ethnography and narrative approaches are used to study a metropolitan newspaper where it is discovered that personalization contributes in large part to the decisions made by editors regarding whether or not an event is considered newsworthy. This discovery adds another dimension to the perspective that news is a social construction because it presents news as a decision-making process and highlights the human elements which contribute to the determination of news.     

Jambo Bwana: Kenya’s Barack Obama

Taking Barack Obama as a metonym for ??the Kenyan abroad,?? this article provides a speculative history of this figure, arguing that the Kenyan abroad who was once viewed by Kenyans as an exile is now viewed as diasporic. Obama??s trip to Kenya as a diasporic tourist in Dream from My Father is a point of departure from which to map how the diasporic subject functions in the Kenyan imagination. At the heart of this change from exile to diasporic is the remittance economy. This shift in terms signifies a change in which politics is subordinated to economics. This article examines how this change, and the figure of Obama himself, produces different configurations of Kenyan-ness as understood and practiced by the government, Kenyans abroad, and Kenyans in Kenya.     

Summits of Information: Advocacy Officers,Journalists, and Newsmaking at International Summits

In spite of the growing visibility of international summits in the last decade, little is known about how these events actually unfold. Neither the role played by the media in these highly scrutinized gatherings, nor the organizational setting in which news is produced, have been extensively described. Focusing on one such summit, this article shows what a close-up view of the otherwise-invisible Media Center can offer to sociological analysis. Year after year, these spaces have increasingly been colonized by certain NGOs attempting to influence the proceedings of these summits. This article highlights some overlooked factors that make some groups better able than others to promote their perspective, and lays bare a mechanism I call mediated pressure, by which journalists try to influence negotiators through the dissemination of their claims in the news.