DBA123, Bourdieu

I felt as if the reading “On Television” directly related to topics we discuss in CMC all the time. TV’s ability to reach such a large audience is what gives it so much power. Not only over the general public, but other media outlets as well. Bourdieu discusses how the news must report only on soft subjects, or ones that are less controversial, in order to keep viewers happy and ratings high. He also really hits hard on journalists.

“Journalists- we should really say the journalistic field- owe their importance in society to their de facto monopoly on the large-scale informational instruments of production and diffusion of information.” (329)

Bourdieu’s opinion of the field of journalism is that these people want nothing more than “to be a part of the intellectual crowd,” and are sometimes given recognition as being so due to the fact that they have the power to control what the public thinks. What they report on, or what they find important, can shape society’s “vision of the world, their conception of problems, and their point of view,” (330). When these thoughts are expressed on television, other media outlets, mostly print media, are forced to decide if they should follow suit and report objectively to gain larger public recognition, or continue to run smaller special interest pieces, more relevant to a smaller group of people. Print media could be in danger of losing much of its clientele when it chooses to not report from such an objective angle, or because it chooses to not run the same types of articles everyday (beside from the obvious topics such as weather).

One of the past theorists we studied, Adorno, says, “to be entertained means to be in agreement.” Bourdieu points out how journalists accomplish this; “telling us what we ‘should think’ about what they call ‘social problems,” (330). If we are agreeing to listen to what the journalists are reporting about, we are letting them decide what we should find significant in the world’s daily happenings.