Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 74-05(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Jeffrey C. Alexander.

In recent years, American journalism has experienced considerable financial strain, including plummeting newspaper circulation and advertizing revenues. Many attribute the economic problems in journalism, at least in part, to new digital media technologies that convey news reports to audiences instantly and for free. This study interrogates why, aside from and in addition to recent financial problems, the standards of professional journalism are perceived to be in acute decline and in crisis today. Why is the current moment interpreted as a crisis of professional journalism? This study shows that the answer is more complex than the current financial downturn alone. I explain that the current "crisis" in American journalism is produced by and within the abiding meaning system of American journalism that has governed professional journalism for over a century.

Since the turn of the twentieth century, ideals associated with objectivity - including fact-based reporting, accuracy, independence, and respectability - have governed professional journalism. Yet, because objectivity is tenuous at best, journalism is characterized by the continual threat that influence, manipulation, and sensation, instead of dispassionate reporting, will symbolically represent the news. Today's discourse of crisis claims that journalism in the digital era faces new and urgent problems, yet this cultural sociological study indicates that concerns about declining or disappearing journalistic standards, and grave doubts about the future of professional journalism, are not new. Today and in previous eras, the past seems to represent the high mark of professional journalism in the United States, and the future of the news seems exceptionally uncertain.

My purpose in this study is to make sense of these claims of the "crisis" of journalism and the "end" of journalism in cultural and historical terms. I develop a perspective that enables us to see how claims of decline and crisis work as authoritative descriptions of reality within a certain historical context and a particular network of meanings. At the same time, I aim to illustrate how a cultural sociological approach, as opposed to the dominant approaches of newsroom ethnography and Bourdieuian field analysis, can uniquely explain and account for perceptions and actions regarding journalism over time and in current journalistic discourses. While other social scientific studies of news media focus on the production of the news, the content of the news, and audience reception of news reports, this cultural sociological study analyzes how speakers interpret the news in journalistic discourses, including the purposes of the news in modern democracies, the responsibilities of news organizations and journalists, and the ways in which journalism falls short of its own ideals.

Through a cultural sociological examination of journalistic discourses, I find that the ideals of objectivity in journalism and the fragility of objectivity are continually re-narrated in journalistic discourses, especially at the introduction of new technology, developments, trends, and during moments of transition. What's more, "new" developments in journalism and new generations of journalists tend to be interpreted as threatening to professional journalism. Rather than sustaining and improving journalism, new innovations and newcomers to the journalistic field are often interpreted as detrimental to professional ideals and to the communication of important information through news reports. In every age, objectivity and the ideals of journalism seem to have just disappeared, leaving journalism in decline and in crisis.

Through close empirical examinations of interpretations of entertainment news and of the "news revolution" trope around 1980 and at present, I show that commentators consistently describe the decline and crisis of American journalism as new, surprising, and unprecedented. What's more, the explorations of interpretations of entertainment news and scandal in the news media and news media "revolutions" indicate that we interpret the news in a culturally determined manner, relying on binary oppositions, narrative, and tropes to describe and assess events and changes in journalism and the news media.

By uncovering the cultural construction of the perpetual discourse of pollution and crisis in American journalism, this study suggests that the ideals of objectivity are not disappearing; indeed, the ideals associated with journalistic objectivity remain the symbolic representations of professional journalism in the United States. To conclude, I suggest that instead of being replaced by polluting symbolic codes, objectivity and its related ideals are reconstituted in every era in American journalism. Objective, serious, professional news will not pass away, as discourses of crisis claim, but what constitutes these signifiers is continually re-narrated and renegotiated.