News Media as a “Journalistic Field”: What Bourdieu Adds to New Institutionalism, and Vice Versa

Abstract

Bourdieu's field theory and the new institutionalism of Cook and Sparrow are similar in that they call for a new unit of analysis for journalism studies: between the individual news organization and the society as a whole, the “mezzo-level” interorganizational and professional environment of the field/institution. Bourdieu's focus on competition and difference, rooted in processes of cultural and economic class distinctions both among audiences and cultural producers, supplements the new institutionalist emphasis on homogeneity; moreover, Bourdieu's emphasis on a professional or intellectual autonomy (however limited) of journalists as a collective body, elided in new institutionalist accounts, remains an essential element of any thorough media analysis. Conversely, new institutionalists' greater attention to the state as a partially autonomous influence on the journalistic field helps fill a crucial gap in Bourdieu's model. Both approaches could be improved by adopting a broader view and analyzing effects on news content and form of variations in national journalistic fields (and field configurations)—in particular the organizational/spatial ecology of journalistic competition, and the cultural inertia of professional traditions rooted in contingent historical processes of field formation.