3   How Has the Press Historically Made Its Freedom?

Before exploring how the networked press might earn its freedom by helping to ensure a public right to hear, I need to describe what it means to make the press a unit of analysis. First, I argue that the press has never been a singular thing. Rather, it always has been an institutional mélange of people and forces that, at different times and in different ways, have distinguished and intertwined themselves. One way of seeing any given era of the press is to look at how these things have separated and collided, ask why, and examine how their relationships matter. For example, at various points in its history, the press has aligned itself with or eschewed different goals and practices—facts versus values, objectivity versus subjectivity, state sponsorship versus circulation revenue versus advertising income, marketplace success versus critical achievement, expert sources versus audience involvement, and a variety of reporting techniques, organizational rituals, educational initiatives, professional associations, hiring practices, linguistic strategies, and institutional experiments—that added up to particular institutional arrangements.

This is how I think we should see the contemporary, networked, institutional press—as a dynamic set of separations and dependencies that create the conditions under which journalists work, news is produced, and audiences become publics. The press is less a single, discernible thing than an outgrowth of forces governing a field of expression, circulation, and interpretation. Intentional or not, these relationships let people and objects rely on and distinguish themselves from others, creating normative models of the press.

Mirroring the model of democratic autonomy described in the previous chapter—the mix of independence and dependence that self-governance requires—these field-level separations and dependences are how the institutional press manifests negative and positive freedoms. They are how the press shows what it thinks freedom is and why it thinks it needs that freedom. Just as individual autonomy is achieved not only through freedom from constraint (because self-realization is always relational), the press earns its freedom not only by separating itself from markets, states, or audiences but also by strategically relying on others—insofar as its separations and dependencies help to ensure a public right to hear. The idea of autonomy—as freedom from and reliance on—does normative double duty

•  As the basis for the kind of individual self-realization and democratic self-governance that the press ideally exists to support (described in the previous chapter) and

•  As a description of the institutional balances that the press must strike to be free from interferences that harm a public right to hear but not so isolated that it assumes this right can be ensured only by some preexisting, static notion of what defines the press (as this chapter argues).

My assertion is that the press most defensibly earns its freedom when its institutional separations and dependencies make possible the kind of hearing that self-governing publics require. This kind of press freedom might require it to be free from outside influences—with the reporting access, editorial independence, and publishing power that the press historically has protected—but it also may require the press to enter into strategic relationships with other actors, even if these relationships interfere with a purely negative, freedom-from conception of press autonomy. The press’s normative legitimacy comes not from how well it distances itself from others—a kind of negative-only autonomy that brings with it all the institutional problems that a purely freedom-from conception of self-governance has—but from how well it creates the institutional conditions that ensure a public right to hear. This is why the first part of this chapter develops a conceptual framework for seeing press freedom as a distributed, field-level concept that can be earned only through relationships.

Second, I want to show how press freedom has always entailed institutionalized balancing of forces, not simply freedom from influences assumed to be interferences. I trace historical patterns in the press’s relationships, analyzing how reporters, editors, and news organizations have traditionally both distanced themselves from and yet relied on markets, states, experts, and audiences. That is, although press freedom is often thought of as publishers’ freedom from others, the press has a long history of pursuing aims through relationships with others. But to what aims? What kind of institutional autonomy has emerged from these relationships? And how close does this resulting autonomy fit with the previous chapter’s call for press freedom premised on a public right to hear?

These two approaches to making the press as a unit of analysis—defining the press as a field of forces and tracing the kinds of autonomy these forces historically have created—entail seeing it not as a single, unified object of analysis that lives within any one profession, set of practices, regulatory regime, organizational type, or audience relationship. Rather—thinking ahead to the next chapter’s tracing of networked press freedom as an ideal achieved through sociotechnical relationships—it means using a normative ideal—press freedom and, more specifically, a public right to hear—as a way to read and critique the intersecting forces that make up the press as a field.

The Press as a Field

Understanding the contemporary networked press means appreciating both the practice of journalism and the conditions under which it is practiced. The actions and assumptions of journalists, news organizations, the commercial market, advertisers, legal regimes, and audience expectations all reinforce and reflect the different types of news imagined as possible at any given time. This makes the study of the press in general and the study of press autonomy in particular a study of mezzo levels—spaces between micro, individual actions and the broader, macro forces in which freedoms from and reliances on are negotiated and resisted.

Such an investigation is thus a study of structure-agency negotiations. For example, journalists may be drawn to crime reporting because of personal experiences, but they must channel or reconfigure these passions into the objectivity and professional detachment demanded by their news organization’s culture, their colleagues’ expectations, and their desire to win reporting awards. As they frame issues, interview people, write stories, and work with editors, they reconcile personal perspectives with professional and cultural values that expect crime reporters to behave in a certain way. Like many professionals, they inhabit a mezzo layer that requires constant negotiation and reorientation to their own passions and the norms of those around them.

Press autonomy exists in such mezzo levels—not in the freedom of particular journalists to do what they please but in the forces that simultaneously separate them from and make them rely on social forces beyond their control. The study of contemporary press autonomy and its history is thus the study of how any given era of social science sees pieces relating to wholes—how it understands people as both products and agents of social systems and their interactions as the places where autonomy is negotiated. This dialectic between individual agency and social structure underpins several long-standing theories of communication and organization. For example, George Herbert Mead saw an individual’s utterances not as “inner meanings to be expressed” but evidence of “co-operation in the group taking place by means of signals and gestures” (Mead, 1934/1967, p. 6), laying the groundwork for symbolic interactionism’s view of language as material for people to create shareable interpretations (Blumer, 1969, p. 5) and structuration theory’s (Giddens, 1984) argument that social structures are always both “the medium and the outcome of the practices [that] constitute social systems” (Sewell, 1992, p. 4).

These ideas of agency and structure grew out of efforts by early social scientists like Ernst Cassirer to create a “science of culture” that might explain how humans both interpret and structure their environments as they try to “give form to experience” (1923/1953; 1942/1960, p. 22). He challenged what he saw as a “crisis in the concept of evolution upon which the entire naturalistic philosophy of culture is built” (Cassirer, 1942/1960, p. 34) and argued that physical models of causality were being overapplied to the study of culture. He criticized the idea that “all events in the human world are subject to the laws of nature and that they are the outgrowth of fixed natural conditions” (p. 16), distinguishing between physical laws that are beyond human influence and social forces subject to human intervention and interpretation. He did not reject causality, determinism, or logical proof as social science epistemologies but was concerned that a social science rooted in naturalist philosophy would provide few clues about how a social environment might be changed and thus prevent people from realizing an “aesthetically liberated life” (Cassirer, 1946, p. 98). He warned that the “titanic creative power of the individual is in conflict with the forces with have as their goal the preservation and, in a sense, the immortalization of the status quo” (Cassirer, 1942/1960, p. 197). Individuals could never achieve freedom from social forces; the best they could hope for was equality with them.

Although Cassirer rightly saw people in tension with their social worlds, he seemed to hold onto the idea that a truly creative, liberated self could be realized if it could negotiate a better deal with external forces of status quo preservation. Social forces existed, he said, but they were pitted against individual agency.

This assumption was challenged by Kurt Lewin (1951), whose field theory saw a person not as an atomic, stable entity who could negotiate with the environment but as a series of “dynamic and nondynamic constructs” (p. 39) that, together, defined his or her position (location relative to a group, occupation, activity, including how near or far someone might feel or physically be from them), locomotion (the pattern of positions over time), force (a tendency for locomotion), goal (a field that distributes forces in space), conflict (clashes among the forces governing someone locomotion), fear (expectations of the present, hopes for the future, and guilt about the past), power (the likelihood of inducing forces), and values (the ways forces gain positive and negative valences). Missing from psychology, Lewin argued, was the recognition that the

individual sees not only his present situation; he has certain expectations, wishes, fears, daydreams for his future. His views about his own past and that of the rest of the physical and social world are often incorrect but nevertheless constitute, in his life space, the “reality-level” of the past. (Lewin, 1951, p. 53)

If individuals were never rational, unitary wholes striving to realize a preexisting self, then it made little sense to think of their autonomy as separation from social forces. Freedom was not distance from or closeness of one thing to another thing; it had to entail some other kind of configuration of elements that, inseparably, governed individuals and societies. The right unit of analysis for understanding intertwined individual and social developments was a field—a set “of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually interdependent” and that objectively define the variety of “possible life spaces” (Lewin, 1951, p. 240) available to us at any given time. Theses mutually interdependent spaces—not individuals or social forces—were the right unit of analysis for understanding human expression, learning, and organization.

Bourdieu’s Field Theory

Motivated by Cassirer’s philosophy of culture and Lewin’s social psychology of fields, Pierre Bourdieu (1990, p. 25) created a new theory designed to bridge the “most fundamental, and the most ruinous” divide in social science—between subjectivism and objectivism. He aimed to understand how individual creativity intersects with social organization—how artists have historically influenced, recreated, leveraged, resisted, and adapted to the dynamics of cultural production that make their individual freedom possible. He found that cultural products—writing, paintings, music, architecture—need both “agents of consecration” (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 121) to confer legitimacy on small-scale producers who take risks developing new forms of art (the avant-garde painter survives through patrons’ money and critics’ approvals) and also large-scale markets that give artists cultural and economic stability by organizing popular approval into stable consumerism (the fiction writer contracts to produce books with predictable, well-selling literary structures, themes, plots and characters). Cultural production is never about solitary individuals with ideas or “sovereign viewpoints” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 27) that are distributed to willing, open-minded audiences. Patrons and their artists co-cultivate novelty for audiences who need to be nurtured. The freedom to create becomes collectively meaningful and powerful only when it aligns with cultural infrastructures.

Instead of thinking that people form views through either first-person subjectivity or omniscient objectivity, Bourdieu’s field theory calls for a relational epistemology in which taking a position—defined as having a perspective and interpreting others’—is the principal unit of analysis. Bourdieu (1990, p. 53) captures this ongoing balance between dispositions and structures in his concept of habitus as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions … which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.” In other words, individual perspectives work to the extent that they can make sense of and circulate among social structures that, in turn, create new perspectives.

Habitus thus shows people with freedom to express a variety of “thoughts, perceptions and actions” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 55)—but only those relevant to a particular set of forces acting at particular times. These forces, in turn, create a field—a “space of possibles” (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 30) “within which agents occupy positions that statistically determine the positions they take with respect to the field, these position-takings being aimed at either conserving or transforming the structure of relations of forces that is constitutive of the field”1 (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 30). Bourdieu argues that each field has its own dynamics. The literary field is “an independent social universe with its own laws of functioning, its specific relations of force, its dominants and its dominated … where, in accordance with its particular laws, there accumulates a particular form of capital … [and] entirely specific struggles”² (Bourdieu, 1993, pp. 163–164).

What does it mean for members of a field—or the field itself—to be autonomous? Autonomy, Bourdieu argues, depends on how habitus and position takings are encroached on (1) by influences that a field’s dominant forces consider to be beyond its scope and (2) by actors from adjacent fields who are attempting to shift position in ways that a field and its members cannot avoid.

In his study of French artistic fields in the late nineteenth century, Bourdieu saw how writers and artists gained autonomy from the financier, commissioning patron, or state-sponsored “protector of the arts” who supported—and directed—their work (Bourdieu, 1996b, p. 49). Such domination was broken only when writers and artists learned to move between two modes of support—markets and durable links. Markets cast art as symbolic goods (with sales figures and revenue streams) while durable links were relationships with “apparatuses of consecration” (salons, universities, and elite journals) based on shared affinities and lifestyles among a small set of elite cultural producers. A field’s autonomy, Bourdieu argues, depends on its ability to sustain both of these mechanisms for producing and evaluating symbolic goods. Markets use large-scale, commercial logics to produce low-risk symbolic commodities over short production cycles, creating goods with preestablished forms that are already accessible to “mass publics” with well-understood tastes (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 129; 1996b, p. 142). Restricted spheres of production give artists longer, higher-risk production cycles to create experimental “pure art” so they might compete for the “cultural consecration” of other producers, critics, and “privileged clients” (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 115).

If critically oriented, small-scale artists can work independently of market-oriented, mass-scale demands, then a distinct cultural product can emerge that does not depend on audiences but that eventually may reach them. Bourdieu avoids arguing that restricted production creates better or higher-quality works than large-scale production, but in calling such works novel, high-risk, experimental, and “pure,” he gives “agents of consecration” the responsibility and power to change a field that mass audiences sustain in the meantime. A field’s ability to sustain and create new positions requires both open, mass markets and closed, elite networks.

The field itself, Bourdieu argues, can change in two main ways, both of which reveal vulnerabilities in a field’s autonomy. Its internal struggles, habitus, or networks of consecration and capital exchange may be subject to factional rifts among those not directly tied to the field in question. For example, the French revolution of 1848 briefly encouraged many artists to produce “social art” (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 58) before returning, post-uprising, to earning legitimacy from markets and fellow producers. Sometimes younger newcomers may enter the field, bringing with them “dispositions and position-takings which clash with the prevailing norms of production and the expectations of the field” (p. 57). Such new entrants bring with them a youth and sense of urgency that, Bourdieu argues, are not the direct challenges that factional rifts are but that nonetheless are powerful forces for change.

Both mechanisms for change locate field innovation mostly within the subfield of elite, restricted production where mass publics play one of two roles. Either they are recipients of “consecrated authors dominating the field of [restricted] production [who] also tend to make gradual inroads into the market, becoming more and more readable and acceptable [in a] more or less lengthy process of familiarization” (Bourdieu, 1996b, p. 159), or they are actors who are responsible for fast and often temporary changes when revolutions and political movements entail large-scale uptake.

Bourdieu does not see change originating from public spheres. He makes no mention of how cultural change might be brought about through democratically defensible systems of communication but instead sees field change as a “struggle between the established figures and the younger challengers” (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 60). In this battle for “contemporaneity” (Bourdieu, 1996b, p. 158), power is exercised through illusio, or an “aesthetic” (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 257) that categorizes actors either as forward-looking and avant-garde or as conservative and stagnating.

Bourdieu’s field theory helps show freedom as a field-level concept that intertwines the individual and social—the habitus as the adaptable, acceptable principles that help people both make and make sense of new perspectives (for example, an artist’s innovations always emerge from and are compared to earlier forms); the field as a place where individuals vie for capital and power in relation to a set of forces that determine the positions they might occupy; autonomy as a marker of a mature field’s ability to balance elite, restricted production versus large-scale, mass production and to modulate the power that newcomers have to change a field’s dominant habitus; and illusio as a set of values and aesthetics dominating members’ acceptance and rejection of change.

How well is the field of journalism explained by these concepts? Since Bourdieu developed field theory, his ideas have been taken up, challenged, and adapted by scholars trying to explain how the press’s field dynamics reflect and create publics (a concept Bourdieu largely neglected). Unlike artistic fields of cultural production, the press—ideally and principally—pursues its autonomy in order to advance public interests. It may exist economically as a two-sided market needing to earn revenue from both subscribers and advertisers (S. P. Anderson & Gabszewicz, 2006)—a narrow reading of its autonomy is simply the freedom to create content that succeeds in marketplaces—but it also has historically defined its autonomy, in part, as a freedom to let journalists “exercise independent professional judgment,” even if it required owners to “let the norms of journalism occasionally trump concerns for maximizing profit in order to quiet the public criticism of the power of the media and stave off gathering movements to regulate newspaper ownership or wire service conduct” (Nerone, 2013, p. 450).

Press autonomy has always existed at an intersection of economics, journalistic professionalism, and perceptions of public interest. In Bourdieu’s terms, the press’s autonomy—and the illusio of values and aesthetics that should ultimately privilege its public mission over all others—depends on maintaining multiple scales that allow balances to be struck. These separations and dependencies entail both small-scale, restricted creation by elites who prioritize public over market interests and also mass-scale populist production that demonstrates news’s viability in profitable marketplaces. Press freedom is not just journalism’s freedom from anything that it does not define as journalism (a self-referential definition at best). Rather, it is the power to configure a field of forces to serve public interests. This may mean a smaller press (excluding actors and forces that traditionally have been considered part of journalism), but it also can mean making room for—and articulating expectations of—new entrants to the journalistic field.

This framing raises a number of questions: What qualifies as “public interest?” How can the forces that structure the journalistic field be traced and evaluated against a public interest? Which forces has the journalistic field traditionally managed, and what images of the public emerge from a balancing of those forces? These questions—which are critical for both understanding and challenging the historical roots of contemporary, networked press’s institutional autonomy—have been taken up by a set of scholars concerned with how the journalistic field works and what kind of publics the field makes possible.

Bourdieu’s Journalistic Field

Bourdieu’s influence on journalism is primarily through a short book, On Television (Bourdieu, 1996a), a companion essay, and a series of secondary analyses (Benson, 1999, 2004; Benson & Neveu, 2005b; Neveu, 2007) in which journalism and journalists are critiqued from the perspective of field theory and, conversely, field theory is used to demonstrate the need for public sphere theories that account for media institution dynamics (Benson, 2009).

Bourdieu’s main thesis is that as journalism (particularly television journalism) has become more dependent on large-scale commercial production, it has become less autonomous. First, he claims that the medium of television is driven by “structural corruption” (Bourdieu, 1996a, p. 17) that rewards people who produce spectacles without necessarily knowing what they want to say to an audience or why an audience should listen to them. Television’s time constraints, he says, forces presenters to be “‘fast-thinkers,’ specialists in throw-away thinking” (p. 35) who “say banal things” (p. 18) and do “symbolic violence” (p. 17) as they comment simplistically on complex issues. Journalists, he says, are more motivated to report issues that are “exceptional for them” as they engage in a deadline-driven “relentless, self-interested search for the extra-ordinary” (p. 20). Although such journalists may act “in all good faith and in complete innocence,” their positions within the field of forces governing television news make them “unleash strong, often negative feelings, such as racism, chauvinism, the fear-hatred of the foreigner, or xenophobia” (p. 21).

Bourdieu is clearly no fan of television, and his application of field theory to journalism reads more like a rant (albeit one that may viscerally resonate in political seasons especially), not a subtle, generative analysis. Without supporting his claim, Bourdieu argues that journalism is at a structural disadvantage compared to other domains of cultural production because it is “much more dependent on external forces … depend[ing] very directly on demand [and] the decrees of the market and the opinion poll” (Bourdieu, 1996a, p. 53). To Bourdieu, contemporary journalists can keep or shift their field positions—markers of autonomy in other fields of cultural production—only if they abandon the risky work rewarded by patrons of small-scale, restricted production and fully adopt the habitus and illusio of mass-scale markets.

Although Bourdieu extends Cassirer’s “philosophy of culture” and Lewin’s field theory into the study of distributed media cultures, his analysis of journalism has significant shortcomings.3 The most obvious is a kind of circular logic as he a priori assumes the homogenization of journalism and journalistic practices while simultaneously arguing against their uniformity. He presumes that the press was once autonomous when he asserts without empirical evidence that its historical autonomy has dwindled. This romanticized view of journalism as a homogeneous and historically stable, independent profession in pursuit of shared ideals does not stand up to historical scrutiny (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001; Nerone, 2013; Schiller, 1979; Schudson, 1978, 2003b). He also fails to distinguish among different kinds of journalists—such as beat reporters, feature writers, investigative journalists, and editorial commentators—as he moves quickly among critiques of television, newspapers, and magazines. In assuming homogeneity of a field he criticizes as being too homogeneous, he misses professional, commercial, and symbolic differences that may show evidence of balancing small-scale restricted production with large-scale mass circulation.

Bourdieu also only briefly touches on the public or democratic features of journalism when he criticizes its “de facto monopoly on the large-scale informational instruments of production and diffusion of information”—a monopoly through which he says journalists “control the access of ordinary citizens … to the ‘public space’” and “one’s ability to be recognized as a public figure” (Bourdieu, 1996a, p. 46). In not further developing the public dimensions of his analysis, he avoids what is probably the most difficult and promising aspect of studying press autonomy as a field-level phenomenon—journalism’s need to establish its autonomy by balancing the small- and mass-scale production that lets it practice and innovate its aesthetics and also by simultaneously serving and critiquing populist passions in ways that help publics thrive. When Bourdieu argues that the journalistic field should have a higher “entry fee” and that some of its actors have a “duty to get out” (Bourdieu, 1996a, p. 65), he leaves his theory open to charges of elitism. He later weakly defends himself by claiming that his ideal “social conditions of production” (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 46) make ideas possible that mass media cannot product. He also side-steps a core tension in journalism’s relationship to democracy—its responsibility not only to influence masses by exposing them to ideas they might not seek for themselves but also to engage with them as people who can also produce novel and democratically valuable interpretations of social life.

In Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Bourdieu, 1996a) and The Field of Cultural Production (Bourdieu, 1993), Bourdieu shows his affinity for elite production when he argues that a field is most autonomous when small-scale, restricted producers are symbolically privileged over those who produce for the market (Bourdieu, 1996b, p. 217). If a field treats elite producers as superior and gives them time and support to develop their ideas, he claims, then over time, their ideas will lead a field’s change, “making gradual inroads into the market” (p. 159) that is unlikely to develop sophisticated ideas on its own. Although he never says so explicitly, to him, elites produce a level of quality that masses receive and eventually adopt.

This elitist autonomy is not democratically defensible. Its subjugation of mass-scale dynamics to small-scale patrons makes it a model of freedom ill-suited to journalism’s democratic duties. Journalism—and thus the bases for its autonomy—is fundamentally different from other fields of cultural production because of its public dimensions. Journalism earns its autonomy not by balancing a binary (small-scale versus restricted production of products for aesthetic elites versus mass markets) but by simultaneously pursuing multidimensional priorities that all point to the press’s unique position as a public institution whose legitimacy derives from principled brokerage.

Adopting an explicitly normative stance, Clifford G. Christians, Theodore L. Glasser, Denis McQuail, Kaarle Nordenstreng, and Robert A. White (2009) identify four key functions of the press that might be used to defend why it needs freedom from and obligations to others in adjacent fields. The press might adopt a monitorial role by scanning and interpreting a “real world of people, conditions, and events” (p. 140) that it sees as relevant or significant to its understanding of journalism’s public function—equipping the “monitorial citizen” (Schudson, 1998) with the information (reports on public forums, government actions, corporate interests) that a journalist thinks she needs to act. The press might also play a facilitative role by creating, managing, and improving public forums; helping civil society groups learn to speak among themselves and to others; and working to create environments that “promote a mosaic of diverse cultures and worldviews” (Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, & White, 2009, p. 159). Third, the press also might adopt a radical stance by insisting “on the absolute equality and freedom of all members of a democratic society in a completely uncompromising way” (p. 179) so that power can be redistributed “from the privileged (typically few) to the underprivileged (typically many)” (p. 181). This is a “revolutionary ideology” in which journalism is “an instrument for challenging and changing political and economic systems” (pp. 181–182). Finally, the press might serve a collaborative role by partnering with corporations, states, and civil society to create “mutual trust” and implement a “shared commitment to mutually agreeable means and ends” (p. 198). Collaboration can be synonymous with “compliance” (a weak form of autonomy in which the press is coerced into behaviors, disregards its own interests, or unreflexively follows its own traditions), “acquiescence” (a begrudging recognition of the pragmatic benefits of cooperating with others for strategic reasons), and “acceptance” (the strongest form of collaboration in which journalists decide that they should cooperate with others because doing so advances journalism’s interests) (Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, & White, 2009, pp. 198–200). Michael Schudson (2008c, p. 12) offers a more condensed, complementary model of press ideals in his list of “six functions journalism has frequently assumed in democratic societies”—information, investigation, analysis, social empathy, public forum, and mobilization.

Journalism scholars and democratic theorists perennially catalog and critique the press’s normative roles in any given era of communication,⁴ with all models at least implicitly acknowledging that the press cannot achieve its democratic duties without simultaneously serving, leveraging, reflecting, and critiquing all of the sectors it encounters. It is too simplistic for Bourdieu to argue that press freedom means balancing elite opinion and mass mobilization so that critical, minority expression might be sustained unsullied by commercial marketplaces. Such neat separations are neither possible nor desirable because the press’s political relevance is inextricable from the social dynamics it describes, interprets, responds to, or tries to influence. Such dynamics (such as elites versus masses) are not simply relationships to balance and manipulate so that the press might carve out a privileged and critical distance from its audiences. These are the very tensions that normative models of the press require journalism to engage. As Schudson argues, what

keeps journalism alive, changing, and growing is the public nature of journalists’ work, the nonautonomous environment of their work, the fact that they are daily or weekly exposed to disappointment and criticism of their sources (in the political field) and their public (whose disapproval may be demonstrated economically as readers cancel subscriptions or viewers change channels). Vulnerability to the audience (the market) keeps journalists nimble in one direction, vulnerability to sources (the government) in another.… [A]bsent these powerful outside pressures, journalism can wind up communicating only to itself and for itself. (Schudson, 2005, p. 219)

For Bourdieu, other fields can contaminate and challenge journalism’s autonomy, damaging an ideal of democracy as a social order led by informed elites. He has a “more ambivalent or at least indirect relation” to democratic normative theory and is more concerned with the social conditions by which “specialized knowledge” and “enlightened citizens” are produced (Benson & Neveu, 2005a, p. 9).⁵ This environment is best created by an autonomous subfield of elites engaged in restricted production for other journalists or narrow audiences free of outside influences. But for Schudson and others who foreground journalism’s public obligations, such influences are potential sources of accountability—ways to make journalism responsive to and engaged with the various forces that make it relevant.

Journalism is thus not an exclusive domain governed by any one organization or profession but an ongoing struggle for resources that its practitioners see as crucial to achieving the kind of autonomy that enables their understanding of the press’s relationship to democracy: “economic capital is expressed via circulation, or advertising revenue, or audience ratings, whereas the ‘specific’ cultural capital of the field takes the form of intelligent commentary, in-depth reporting, and the like—the kind of journalistic practices rewarded each year by the U.S. Pulitzer Prizes” (Benson & Neveu, 2005a, p. 4).

But what does this struggle look like? How does competition for different types of capital—for different separations and dependencies—reveal different ways of conceiving press freedom and thus different visions of journalism’s democratic value?

One set of answers to these questions lies in a newer body of work that traces how the press—as an ideal and a set of institutional arrangements—emerges from distributed, coordinated forces with the power to create, circulate, and signify the importance of accounts of social life. Grouped under the term new institutionalism, it argues that press freedom is less about striking dualistic balances—elites versus masses, patronage versus commercialism, journalism’s democracy versus a marketplace’s—and more about seemingly disparate actors vying for the power to determine what a public is or should be.

The New Institutionalist Press

The new institutionalist school of journalism studies (Benson, 2006; Cook, 1998, 2000, 2006; Kaplan, 2006; Sparrow, 1999, 2006) focuses on how journalism helps to create publics through relationships with political fields. For instance, in his account of how journalists, government officials, and politicians cocreate the news, Timothy Cook (1998, 2000, 2006) expresses no particular faith in journalists’ ability to report the community’s agenda, care for the public on its own, or become contaminated by the large-scale production logics of media marketplaces. Rather, he focuses on the press’s ability to be a competent and critical partner of government. The press exists only through unavoidable codependencies with the state, even though journalists are “poorly equipped to assist in governance” (Cook, 1998, p. 4). No one elects reporters or asks any elected body to hold them accountable beyond what is expected of other citizens. Rather, press oversight is always intertwined with visions of democracy, aiming “to ensure that the news we receive gets us toward the politics and toward the democracy we want” (p. 4). Because the public is an ongoing, contested construction exclusive to neither government nor journalism, it makes little sense to define press autonomy as journalism’s freedom from anything the press sees as incompatible with its definition of the public. New institutionalism says that journalism’s public service is not secured through independence from the state or marketplaces. The press’s public obligations develop according to how well it pursues public values through multilateral, institutional relationships—not how well it separates itself from anything it perceives as nonjournalistic or incompatible with its own definition of public.

This approach is grounded in a broader new institutionalist understanding of organizations, practices, and norms. It looks beyond any particular group, location, or profession and asks how the interplay between human agency and social structure emerges from multiple sites of action and power—formal rules and state-enforced laws (for example, in the U.S. press, consider First Amendment and libel law); the values and priorities embedded within social relations and professions (such as the largely unquestioned ideals of objectivity, balance, and public service that are adopted by many journalists); and the expectations and psychosocial processes governing people’s relationships and perceptions of public service (consider the public’s and journalists’ assumptions about what constitutes a news story, what a credible source is, when news should be delivered and by whom, and what values drive the press’s unique constitutional protections) (W. R. Scott, 2013, pp. 51–58).

A new institutionalist approach focuses not on instruments of formal organizational governance and policy but on how informal, implicit, networked understandings have the power to create, sanction, reproduce, and lend legitimacy to the taken-for-granted beliefs that invisibly underpin institutional actions (W. W. Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). Families, religions, professions, and markets all work not because members rationally and uniformly pursue self-evident aims but because they share (without necessarily consenting to) a persistent set of attributions, habits, and relationships that create and sustain what have come to be collectively recognized as institutions. Drawing on long-standing theories of socially constructed reality (Berger & Luckman, 1967; Blumer, 1939), Lynne G. Zucker defines institutionalization as

the process by which individual actors transmit what is socially defined as real and, at the same time, at any point in the process the meaning of an act can be defined as more or less a taken-for-granted part of this social reality. (Zucker, 1977, p. 728)

Neoinstitutionalism eschews the idea that institutions are “organic wholes” and instead asks how their “loosely coupled arrays of standardized elements” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991, p. 14) combine to create actions that are then judged acceptable—or not—in any particular context. Institutions change when field actors expose “rules that had been taken for granted, calling into question the perceived benefits of those rules, and undermining the calculations on which field relations had been based” (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012, p. 22). Changes in institutions drive changes in collective governance because social problems do not exist a priori but are “only discovered and addressed when they fit within existing institutions” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991, p. 28)—that is, when an institution’s “classifications, routines, scripts, [and] schema” (p. 13) make relationships visible, relevant, and actionable.

Although this view of institutions complements Bourdieu’s field theory—“much of [which] dovetails with and may contribute to a broadening and deepening of the institutional tradition” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991, p. 26)—it presents a different image of institutional autonomy. Whereas Bourdieu saw field freedom as the power to balance small-scale patronage with large-scale commercialism in the pursuit of a dominant illusio that could withstand interference from new entrants, new institutionalism rejects the idea that there is a single or acceptably dominant illusio that is rationally protected from field-level forces. Instead, it favors carefully tracing multidimensional, networked forms of power among competing forces, acknowledging that institutional arrangements endure not because of utilitarian efficiency but because

individuals often cannot even conceive of appropriate alternatives (or because they regard as unrealistic the alternatives they can imagine). Institutions do not just constrain options: they establish the very criteria by which people discover their preferences. (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991, pp. 10–11)

If the press is not only a field but a neoinstitution, then it and its autonomy are constructed relationally. The press exists not because it has been found in nature, is required for self-governance, or enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. It exists because some set of actors, together and insofar as their imaginations allow, make, adhere to, and continually re-create rituals and categories that become taken-for-granted assumptions about what journalism is supposed to be. If the press is simply a set of institutional relationships that continually creates its legitimacy, it makes little sense to hold the press static and defend its autonomy as uncontestable. It makes more sense to (1) describe, as broadly and critically as possible, the institutionalized relationships that make up the press, (2) interrogate the assumptions and imaginations dominating its ongoing institutionalization, and (3) investigate whether this institutionalization helps to create normatively defensible publics. Press autonomy is not about freedom from interference but about a relational power to configure separations and dependencies in pursuit of public goods. Further, press autonomy is never finished but is an ongoing struggle among “loosely coupled arrays of standardized elements”—surely including government, markets, civil society, and journalism—that together create publics that no single actor could or should govern.

This image of networked autonomy as relationships among people, practices, and ideals with contingent separations and dependencies opens up a new way to think about press freedom. Instead of seeing it as enterprise journalism’s independence from forces that it sees as corrupting, networked press autonomy becomes a field-level struggle among new entrants and established actors competing in different corners of a field, with different reaches across networks. In this ideal of networked autonomy, no single actor has complete power, no one part of the network has total command, and no particular vision of the public becomes unimpeachable. For example, the debate over whether a blogger is a journalist illustrates this point because it is simultaneously never-ending and elucidating. When Mayhill Fowler—as an Obama-supporting blogger for the Huffington Post’s 2008 presidential election spinoff Off the Bus (both new entrants to the field of journalism with contestable relationships to the mainstream press)—reported that then-senator Barack Obama said at a fundraiser that some Americans “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” there was no shortage of commentary asking whether Fowler was a legitimate journalist, whether the Huffington Post was a real publication, whether both had broken ethical rules by printing Obama’s seemingly off-the-record comments (Seelye, 2008), and how exactly mainstream broadcasters should treat this person who did not fit into existing journalistic categories (Rosen, 2008).

Although the details of this incident have faded from popular memory and are difficult to translate into contemporary contexts, the perennial question “Is X a journalist?” remains useful. This is not because the question has a definitive answer but because responses to it show who thinks that a particular set of “loosely coupled arrays of standardized elements” in which a journalist finds herself is a category of networked press serving the public well enough to have its institutional autonomy recognized and defended. The conversation is worth having because it lets us see the forces creating and defending different types of journalism—and thus differently networked versions of press autonomy.

Amid these forces, Timothy E. Cook (1998, p. 7) describes how “journalists work hard to maximize their autonomy” as “professional communicators” trained to recast the words of sources into symbolic strategies that inform or persuade audiences (Carey, 1997, pp. 132–133). Some scholars have suggested that experienced journalists internalize this struggle as “bipolar ‘interactional expertise’” (Reich, 2012, p. 339) that lets them shift between evaluating expert opinions and applying their own perceptions of audience interests. They do so while simultaneously “work[ing] hard to present a news account that seems largely beyond their individual control” (Cook, 1998, p. 7). Their autonomy, control, and professionalism, he argues, consist largely of “Taken-for-granted social patterns of behavior valued in and of themselves [that] encompass procedures, routines, and assumptions, which extend over space and endure over time” (p. 84).

This isolated, inward-looking model of individual autonomy requires separating (and assumes the possibility of separating) “news judgments (what’s important)” from “moral judgments (what’s right)” (Ettema & Glasser, 1998, p. 8). When journalists, bloggers, editors, or others with the power to make stories visible to audiences craft stories that they prefer and presume to have public value, they are certainly able to act free of any interference with their news judgment. But they bracket their autonomy within a negative sense of freedom. They lose an opportunity to develop a more sophisticated “mature subjectivity” (Schudson, 1978, p. 192) that acknowledges the impossibility of ever separating themselves from influences that inform, govern, care about, and may benefit from their judgment. The power of individual journalists to make unilateral and seemingly objective decisions consistent with their own vision of the public interest reinforces an image of the truly autonomous journalist as someone free to exercise professional judgment free of influence, but it fails on two counts. First, it erroneously presumes that normatively defensible visions of public interest and self-governance emerge only from a negative conception of freedom (this is the myth of the individual autonomy premised on freedom from critiqued in the previous chapter). Second, it ignores the empirical realities and historical arc of institutional press freedom—namely, that the press has never been completely free from external influences and has in fact always relied on others for its freedoms.

Cook (1998) argues that the U.S. press has never been autonomous from extrafield forces in the way that Bourdieu’s field freedom calls for. Using three kinds of evidence, he reveals news media not as an independent, neutral institution that reports on government but as a political institution that reports with the government.

First, he catalogs government subsidies that historically have supported journalism: powerful political figures sponsored early newspapers; the Postal Act of 1792 made it cheaper to mail newspapers than other correspondence; Congress funded Samuel Morse’s early telegraph experiments that eventually created news wire services; government information offices designed and timed their releases to be easily understood and reprinted by the news media; and even the seemingly restrictive government regulation of radio and television spectra helped the press standardize its use of the new media and rely on regular revenue streams.

Second, Cook shows how news organizations—even those having different owners, working with different media, and targeting different audiences—largely converged into a single institution with “shared processes and predictable products” (Cook, 1998, p. 3). For example, in order to prepare stories in predictable and timely ways, reporters “routiniz[e] the unexpected” (Tuchman, 1973, p. 110) by following particular beats (such as the White House, Congress, and police departments) and modeling their own organizational structures after those of the state. Without “some routine method of coping with unexpected events, news organizations, as rational enterprises, would flounder and fail” (p. 111). Such standardization lets beat reporters talk about their work with colleagues, find new jobs in labor markets that can compare and commodify their work in relation to others, pitch stories to editors and manage their expectations, and consciously or not, coordinate with their competitors to write leads that offer astonishingly similar interpretations of a what makes an event newsworthy (Cook, 1998, pp. 78–79).6

Third, Cook (1998, p. 12) shows how public officials and government sources “dictate conditions and rules of access and designate certain events and issues as important by providing an arena.” By regulating press credentials (signaling certain events to be worthy of selection and exclusion) and providing quotes that easily fit within reporters’ norms of newsworthiness, government officials suggest what is both interesting and important about state business, making it easier for journalists to organize their coverage and exercise seemingly independent judgment.

In defining the news media as a sociopolitical institution inseparable from those it reports on, Cook describes, in institutional terms, how journalistic autonomy is less about freedom from states and markets as they pursue an uncontestable public interest. Rather, press freedom is a relational phenomenon—with the power to participate in “negotiation[s] of newsworthiness” (Cook, 1998, p. 169) with those they depend on and report on.

Press Autonomy as Negotiated Separations and Dependencies

Combining field theory’s notion of autonomy as the intersection of structure and agency with new institutionalism’s theory of autonomy as socially situated relational power, it becomes possible to identify press freedom as the interplay of five dimensions—field interactions, capital competition, negotiated production, actor transitions, and public work. Independent of any particular vision of the public or any normative role for journalism, these dimensions highlight how the press might pursue field-level autonomy that is premised not on separation from external influences but on the negotiation of institutional relationships.

Press freedom does not come from journalism’s unilateral freedom from outside interference as it pursues an uncontestable vision of democratic self-governance. Just as the theory of individual freedom fails when it is held up to the realities of collective self-governance, the idea of press autonomy as unilateral independence from nonjournalistic interference fails to account for the complexities of field-level struggle and neoinstitutional negotiation.

This model of press autonomy that emerges from the application of field theory and new institutionalism to journalism is an analytical ideal, not an empirical account. It describes how press autonomy could be realized through interplays of social forces, resource governance, professional practices, and public expectations. In reality, the press historically has pursued its autonomy in a less overtly coordinated fashion. In reading secondary sources and scholarly studies of how the press has defined itself as like or unlike others, an empirically nuanced view of press freedom appears to complicate this idealized model. We see an image of press autonomy—separations and dependencies in the often implicit pursuit of an illusio defined by relationships—coming from three sources: an institutionalized ideal of objectivity, organizational routines and ritualized practices, and publics bracketed as constructed audiences.

Autonomy through Institutionalized Objectivity

Before the 1920s, U.S. journalists (and most other social practitioners) saw little difference between facts and values (Kaplan, 2002; Mindich, 1998; Schudson, 1978). The generally held assumption was that the world—in both physical and social forms—could be described in terms of facts that were “not human statements about the world but aspects of the world itself” (Schudson, 1978, p. 6). Readers and reporters were seen not as active interpreters of the worlds around them and the information they received but as naive empiricists who discovered and acted on realities that were assumed to be largely free of human construction.

Table 3.1

Elements of press autonomy: Tracing autonomy through configured dependencies

Dynamic		Description
Negotiating with other fields		Press autonomy is a property not of journalism itself but of how journalism relies on or distinguishes itself from other relevant fields, including but not limited to political actors, government actors (state legislation, regulatory agencies, and courts), literary and artistic producers and taste makers, technological innovators, advertisers, financial capital managers, and social movements. In the pursuit of different illusios, the press may find itself more or less aligned with different fields at different times (growing or shrinking as interfield forces command), but its autonomy is always a function of its relationships to other fields, not a stand-alone, immutable property of journalism.
Competing for capital		Press autonomy requires commanding economic capital (resources derived from the market, state subsidies, and private funders) and symbolic capital (signals of legitimation from critical acclaim, circulation numbers, awards, and recognition from elite decision makers). Financial, material, cultural, and political support make it possible for the press to negotiate with other fields, sustain different types of production, securely evaluate new entrants, and realize public missions collaboratively.
Sustaining diverse production scales		Press autonomy entails balancing its two subfields of production, each of which provides the economic and symbolic capital that defines its position with other fields. In restricted activity, a small number of patrons have the power to fund and support high-risk, experimental journalism and new forms of illusio unable to find broader support, and in large-scale information production, consumer-oriented markets finance the press, signal its populist value, underpin its value as a constitutionally protected entity, and provide evidence of its ability to sustain mass publics. The autonomous press needs to be both insulated from and embedded within information markets.
Appreciating new entrants		To be able to negotiate with other fields, command economic and symbolic capital, and balance its relationships with markets, the press must mediate between new and older entrants. Novel actors—defined by young ages, short durations within a field, or attitudes to institutional change—can come from other relevant fields (for example, they might have expert knowledge of how they are like and unlike journalism), attract new forms of capital (such as economic capital of investors looking to fund small-scale restricted activity and symbolic capital that can come with perceptions of novelty and innovation), and signal new types of illusio with the potential power to disrupt dominant norms and existing balances between restricted and large-scale activity. Autonomy is not the power to reject novelty but the ability to understand, include, and negotiate with the field positions of new entrants.
Pursuing public service		With unique constitutional protections and distinct cultural expectations intersecting every dimension of social life, the press’s autonomy differs from other fields in that its illusio fundamentally depends on how well it imagines, articulates, and enacts public missions. This dimension of autonomy does not ask the press to pursue a particular type of public. Rather, its autonomy depends on how well its separations and dependencies enact publics that are pragmatically judged to work—how well its creation and circulation of informational goods and social associations produce self-governance, how accountable its activities are and to whom, how well it explains the need for private action and field-specific privileges, and how well it clashes with or reinforces other fields’ conception of the public good. Because the press’s information provisioning is situated distinctly within a model of public self-governance, its autonomy is not simply a matter of negotiating with other fields, sustaining capital, balancing production scales, and evaluating new entrants. It must articulate its autonomy in terms of collective self-governance.

Although the history of journalistic objectivity has no exact beginning, Stephen J. A. Ward (2005) finds its roots in long-standing philosophical distinctions among ontological objectivity (truth independent of experience), epistemic objectivity (truth as a product of “people’s beliefs and methods of inquiry”), and procedural objectivity (a pragmatic application focused on avoiding bias and irrelevant influences and justifying action through a “firm grasp on the facts of the case”) (pp. 16–18). Most discussions of journalistic objectivity focus on it as epistemology and procedure playing out in professional practices and cultures of media. David T. Z. Mindich (1998, p. 11) claims that it “was certainly an issue at least since 1690”; Michael Schudson (1978, p. 4) argues that “before the 1830s, objectivity was not an issue”; and Mark W. Brewin (2013, p. 213) starts his history of journalistic objectivity during the “heroic,” post–World War II era of the American press in which journalists “managed to extricate themselves from political partisanship and develop a truly professional ethos.” Acknowledging this unsettled history and the varied ways of reading objectivity into any era of the press, I focus on Daniel C. Hallin’s placement of journalistic objectivity in the “scientized” journalism following World War I, when a “habit of disinterested realism” (Hallin, 1985, p. 130) was grounded in “a faith in ‘facts,’ a distrust of ‘values,’ and a commitment to their segregation” (Schudson, 1978, p. 6).

First, in the aftermath of World War I, Walter Lippmann (1922) argues, journalists slowly realized that the accounts that they received from government sources of both specific battles and the war’s underlying rationale were often not truthful descriptions of actual events but stories constructed to persuade publics and elites to hold particular beliefs or attitudes. Although it was commonplace for reporters to interview sources, take verbatim notes, and produce “fact-centered” accounts in the lead-up to the war, afterward journalists began to question whether facts were or even could be true (Schudson, 2001). The state’s widespread use of propaganda suggested to journalists that the democratic institutions they assumed to be acting in the public interest were actually agenda-driven organizations that advanced their own priorities and values and were interested in convincing the press to circulate their versions of “facts.” The press needed to become its own center of power and accelerated its search for new methods of reporting and an organizing ideology—a particularly journalistic epistemology that could let it produce accounts of and for publics in ways that were verifiably independent of the propaganda produced by governments that had sustained such a disastrous war. Its new ideology of objectivity—a commitment to separating the journalistic production of facts from outside influences and values—was both an aspirational epistemology and evidence of its professional maturity: “a natural and progressive ideology for an aspiring occupational group at a moment when science was god, efficiency was cherished, and increasingly prominent elites judged partisanship a vestige of the tribal 19th century” (Schudson, 2001, p. 162).

Lippmann, an already accomplished elite American intellectual, saw this new ideology as a key element of how the press could responsibly separate audiences from elites and prevent mass public opinion from being controlled and manipulated. In 1922, he warned the press against using its power to create dangerous “pseudo-environments” (Lippmann, 1922, p. 10) because when inserted between “man and his environment,” they created “pictures which are acted upon by groups of people” that, in turn, become “Public Opinion with capital letters” (p. 18). He argued that the postwar press was simply a tool for stereotyping (his newly coined term). At best, it sloppily assembled half-truths that others were forced to explain to the unwitting public, and at worst, it trafficked in harmful manipulations that required real thought and power to overcome—thinking and power that he felt few people were capable of putting into practice. Lippmann wanted journalists to be able to derive facts about the social world in the same way that he believed physicists were able to discover truths about the physical world (pp. 227–229). In making such a critique, however, Lippmann did more than decry the professional practices of journalists. He made an epistemological assumption, equating the social worlds that journalists attempt to explain with the material worlds that physicists aim to predict.

The entire system of electoral democracy in which citizens choose representatives was unworkable without “an independent, expert organization … making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions” (Lippmann, 1922, p. 31). Unlike the stereotyping journalists who let the country slip into a fraudulent war, the new professional, objective press envisioned by Lippmann would be driven by a new “political science” that could shape public opinion “in advance of real decision, instead of [being an] apologist, critic, or reporter after the decision has been made.” To Lippmann, objectivity was an ideology for negotiated autonomy: it would help separate journalists from propagandists and simultaneously embed journalists within a science of politics that could, in turn, separate masses from the decisions they were ill-equipped to make.

Although seemingly elitist and anathema (Carey, 1987) to the critical, populist democracy that John Dewey (1954, 1963, 1997) said could be achieved through mass education, communication, and participation, Lippmann realistically and optimistically envisioned the press as an instrument of democracy. He was not an “antidemocrat” who envisioned an elite press as the sole caretaker of the public interest. Instead, he saw journalism as one of the many specialized domains that publics needed to navigate the complex information environments of modern, large-scale democracies. Just as the Census Bureau and the Department of Agriculture have their own areas of expertise (Schudson, 2008a)—and akin to Zvi Reich’s (2012) “bipolar interactional expertise” that experienced journalists use to shift among the perspectives of sources, audiences, and colleagues—Lippmann saw journalists as privileged insiders and expert boundary workers. They could use the separations and dependencies that objectivity both created and required to translate political systems for those who would always be outside. In The Phantom Public, he wrote that

only the insider can make decisions, not because he is inherently a better man but because he is so placed that he can understand and act. The outsider is necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome, because he is trying to navigate the ship from dry land.… [C]ompetence exists only in relation to function; … men are not good, but good for something. (Lippmann, 1925, p. 140)

Sounding like a student of yet-to-be-invented field theory and neoinstitutional sociology, Lippmann envisioned press autonomy not as a matter of elites policing borders but as a property of a journalistic system composed of actors with different roles, skills, privileges, and responsibilities.

In this way, Lippmann’s search for the press’s autonomy in a complex system of large-scale democratic governance that required communication was entirely consistent with Dewey’s review of Lippmann’s Phantom Public, in which Dewey wrote that the “modern state is so large that decisions made and the executions initiated are necessarily remote from the mass of citizens; modern society is not only not visible, but it is not intelligible continuously and as a whole” (Dewey, 2008, pp. 214–215). Dewey and Lippmann both envisioned a professional press that was close to elite decision making, separate from propaganda-driven stereotypes, embedded in local communities, and yet free from the passions of mass publics—an autonomous, objective press that would help publics “intervene occasionally” (Dewey, 2008, p. 216) in the business of self-governance.

Just as journalism was beginning to ground its autonomy in the separations and dependencies that the ideology of objectivity required, a new profession was emerging that resembled journalism but that explicitly collapsed facts and values—public relations. Public relations professionals were not disinterested reporters or accountable government officials. Rather, they represented a new kind of intermediary between powerful elites and mass audiences whose motivations were not driven by an adherence to democratic principles, an ideology of objectivity, or a history of wartime deception. They served bosses who wanted messages spread, beliefs changed, and behaviors modified. Journalists worried that their inchoate autonomy—grounded in objectivity—would be eclipsed by these new “parajournalists” who, to the uninitiated public Lippmann warned of, were indistinguishable from journalists. By the early 1920s, “50 or 60 percent of stories, even in the venerable New York Times, were inspired by press agents and that the new Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City was churning out more graduates for the public-relations industry than for the newspaper business” (Schudson, 2003b, p. 83).

In the midst of this professional challenge, postwar journalism deepened its commitment to autonomy through a disinterested pursuit of the public good by investing in or bootstrapping three institutional projects that could distinguish it from other information professionals—journalism schools, professional bodies, and statistical techniques. First, although U.S. journalists require no license or degree to practice—indeed, they often hid their degrees from hiring editors who viewed college graduates suspiciously (Folkerts, 2014)—journalism schools have historically acted as gatekeepers of the profession (Josephi, 2009). They define a body of teachable knowledge distinct from other higher education units, are accredited by professional bodies that periodically audit their performance, demarcate expertise levels in the form of entry-level and advanced degrees, usually espouse ethical commitments to ideals that define the profession’s social value, and produce graduates who, through practice, signify the profession’s broader cultural meaning (Abbott, 1988; Folkerts, 2014; Hatch, 1988; M. L. Larson, 1977; Schudson, 1988; Schudson & Anderson, 2008). Developing alongside or emerging from English and literature departments and schools of social science, speech, rhetoric, and communication, U.S. journalism schools have always stayed close to both practices and ideas. They have aimed to be homes for teaching vocational skills by providing an “old-fashioned apprenticeship” that “duplicate[s] the atmospherics of a newspaper” (Carey, 2000), for doing social science research, and for making liberal arts reflections on journalism (Folkerts, 2014). The press’s autonomy, as expressed in its professional schools, arises when journalists learn how to distinguish themselves from other disciplines—the practice and study of journalism has always implicated different interpretive communities (Zelizer, 2004)—and when they learn how to become employable and reflective practitioners who can navigate the intersections of commercial news practice, social science research, and critical humanistic inquiry. The ideal graduate speaks all three journalistic languages, although practice has always dominated the triad (Folkerts, 2014).

Second, as the number of U.S. journalism schools rapidly grew—increasing from ten in 1920 to fifty-five in 1928 (Folkerts, 2014)—professional bodies emerged alongside. They provided quality control (by accrediting and ranking journalism schools and conducting professional inquiries), convened practitioners through yearly meetings and surveys, and published original research on journalism designed to produce both best practices and intellectual contributions to the fledgling study of the news (Folkerts, 2014; Zelizer, 2004). Three organizations in particular illustrate the press’s search for autonomy through dependencies and separations that professional bodies could govern:

•  At its founding convention in 1922, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) created a member code of ethics espousing the principles of sincerity, truthfulness, accuracy, and impartiality, declaring that news “should be free from opinion or bias of any kind” (cited in Schudson, 2003b, p. 82). In 1947, outgoing ASNE president Wilbur Forrest used the annual meeting to warn against looming threats to editorial independence coming from labor unions and government regulators. He called on the ASNE to make its own definition of press freedom before the new Hutchins Commission did it for them (Pickard, 2014a, pp. 152–153).

•  Formed in 1887, the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA) was founded for “the advancement of the business interests of daily newspapers” and the adjudication of “conflicts with advertisers, with labor, with communications competitors, with newsprint makers, and with the government.” To survive economic shocks to the newspaper industry, the association agreed “by voluntary secret agreement to limit industry-wide production, to allocate satisfactory quotas, and to stabilize selling prices” (Emery, 1950, p. 3).

•  The progressive amalgamation of various associations of journalism school teachers and administrators created the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) for the “advancement of academic and professional education for journalism, encouragement of communication research, and cooperation with media practitioners in their efforts to raise the standards of their profession” (Emery & McKerns, 1987, p. 1).

These three bodies suggest different versions of press autonomy because of the separations and dependencies they prioritize. The ASNE convened editors around principles and defended them against what it saw as outside threats; the ANPA let press owners collude to withstand market forces that it saw as disruptive and nonjournalistic; and the AEJMC gathered teachers and researchers to define a body of knowledge that might shape press practices, businesses, and scholarship. As these organizations show, because there is no single vision of the press, there is no one definition of press autonomy. Press freedom is, instead, very much a property of how a field of forces—in these cases, arranged into organizational bodies—understands differently the value of editorial practice, commercial success, or intellectual rigor.

Third, in the interwar period, U.S. journalism began to both rely on and distance itself from the polling techniques, survey data, and logics of quantification that social scientists were using to create supposedly objective representations of public opinion. Akin to the role Lippmann envisioned for the press, pollsters saw themselves as scientific intermediaries between governing elites and mass audiences, challenging the idea that journalists, politicians, or anyone wedded to narrative modes of communication could represent the beliefs of a large-scale citizenry better than a survey researcher using objective techniques to sample a preinformed public. In 1939, Gallup wrote that “through the process of sampling referendum, the people, having heard the debate on both sides of every issue, can express their will. After one hundred and fifty years, we return to the town meeting. This time the whole nation is within the doors” (Gallup, 1939, p. 15). The press could give audiences information, but pollsters thought that their objective, scientific techniques could recreate, on mass scales, the kind of intimate conversations that traditionally had defined deliberative, participatory democracy. Their surveys could—at scale and with scientific rigor—do what the press was trying to do through individual stories that were written by biased reporters and that had to be interpreted by uninitiated audiences. Pollsters could say what the public really thought because their techniques aligned with the era’s dominant positivist, bureaucratic epistemologies used by “a new generation of managers and technical specialists” to use “rationality, methodical processes, and standards of ‘objectivity’ in place of public deliberation” (Boyte, 1995, p. 427). Pollsters said that they did not have to worry about separating facts and values the way journalists did because they worked only with facts.

Journalists largely embraced polling techniques and survey results because they let them transform “the subjectivity of opinion into the objectivity of fact” (Salmon & Glasser, 1995, p. 444). As they buttressed their stories with polling data—or simply wrote stories about poll results—journalists could distance themselves from any discussion of public opinion quality (which was a matter for scientific methodologists) and from the content of public opinion (polls were not what journalists thought the public thought but what social scientists found the public to be thinking). This distancing was accompanied by a kind of closeness that gave scientific weight to the press’s pursuit of objectivity. Polls, surveys, actuarial tables, margins of error, and stories that fit within the bounds of a questionnaire results became core components of reporting, especially in election journalism (Carey, 1995), with news organizations eventually creating their own polling operations. Without numerical backing, journalists’ ability to write authoritatively about broad cultural forces was constrained, but with the “facts” that quantification provided, they were freer to explore the more qualitative, narrative dimensions of storytelling that gave context and color to statistics. McClure’s Magazine (1893–1929) could headline an article “What Women Should Weigh” as it uncritically made insurance company actuarial tables the basis of a 1909 story, seeing correlation as a news peg and a “basis for action” (Bouk, 2015, p. 123). And the New York Times could confidently question a life insurance company treating the labor of men and women differently by stating that the “feeling that goes with” the services provided by women “ought to be worth at least the extra 25 per cent” (p. 168)—without ever questioning the wisdom or public consequences of accepting the premise that labor should be commodified in terms of gender.

By tying themselves tightly to the epistemologies of polling, journalists outsourced part of their objectivity and garnered a new kind of freedom. This outsourcing made possible an almost exclusive authority to interpret and frame polls, letting them rise above statistics and exercise a unique freedom to say what numbers meant.

These polling techniques also let the press position the separations and dependencies of its objectivity as instruments of two fundamental features of modern Western democracy—the notion that individual expression (aggregated in statistically defensible forms like polls) is the purest form of power in a democratic society made up of rational citizens (Salmon & Glasser, 1995) and the idea that modern democracies are so large and complex that they can be sustained only by systems of public opinion that use “quantification and statistics … to routinize processes of observation” (Herbst, 1995, p. 12). Even if these aggregations bear little resemblance to how citizens themselves develop public opinions or discuss their experiences and perspectives (Gamson, 1992; Herbst, 1993; Igo, 2007), polls let journalists recast the public as “a statistical artifact” (Carey, 1995, p. 392)—“a demographic segment or data set rather than a realm of action” (J. D. Peters, 1995, p. 20).

Taken together, these three dimensions of how journalism tried to distinguish itself from other information professionals—by having journalism schools act as gatekeepers of the profession, by establishing professional bodies, and by relying on and distancing itself from polling techniques, survey data, and the logics of quantification—illustrate how press autonomy emerged from separations and dependencies in the service of objectivity. Journalists’ uncritical echoing of state propaganda during World War I convinced them that they needed a professionalism premised on separating facts and values; the rise of the public relations professional highlighted the need to institutionalize the separation of facts and values; the creation of journalism schools and professional bodies revealed a nascent press trying to carve out a unique identity amid demands for vocational training, academic research, and commercial success; and the adoption of public opinion polling and logics of quantification as ways to perform objectivity placed statistics at the heart of objective journalism in a way that left journalists freer to assert their unique authorities as disinterested interpreters of information.

Objectivity, in this sense, is not freedom from external influences but the achievement of a field that sees facts as “consensually validated statements” about the world (Schudson, 1978, p. 7). It requires journalists to be “reflective practitioners” (Schön, 1983) who can situate their factual claims within a personal system of separations and dependencies—whom they are close to, what they assume, what principles guide their actions, which people and ideas they are disconnected from, and what they are unaware of. As Judith Lichtenberg (2000, pp. 251–252) puts it, the “objective investigator may start out neutral (more likely, she is simply good at keeping her prior beliefs from distorting her inquiry), but she does not necessarily end up neutral.” Journalists who naively and stubbornly adhere to neutrality understand the separations and dependencies of their profession’s ideology of objectivity far less well than journalists who situate their actions within a community of interpretation (Zelizer, 1997) that sees some separations and dependencies as essential and others as corrupting.

It is not up to individual journalists to work out the significance of these separations and dependencies and their relationship to press autonomy. They are instead embedded in the routines and rituals that journalists have historically shared and used to distance themselves from and embed themselves within the worlds they report on.

Autonomy through Organizational Routine and Ritual

This belief in objectivity was gradually standardized into the largely unexamined rituals and routines that news organizations used to codify and standardize press autonomy. Instead of asking journalists to work out on their own, in every situation, the salient differences between news and nonnews, facts and values, numbers and narratives, U.S. news organizations built cultures that did this work for them. Journalists could outsource any questions about how to identify news, treat sources, and convey expert disinterest to a taken-for-granted system of separations and dependencies, simplifying complexity and reducing the need for their conscious, idiosyncratic action (James, 1914). Their own understanding of freedom became intertwined with an almost unassailable set of shared rituals that defined what their profession meant or could mean in any context (Swidler, 1986). These rituals gave them the freedom to pursue and publish stories that fit within common expectations of what the press should do—but they also narrowed the meaning of press autonomy to a set of largely invisible separations and dependencies that came to define what the press could do.

Many studies show that journalists have historically crafted accounts of the world according to largely unspoken, shared heuristics about where they expect news to be (Ehrlich, 1996; Gans, 1979; Molotch & Lester, 1974; Tuchman, 1972, 1973, 1978); when they expect news to happen (Barnhust & Mutz, 1997; Bell, 1995; Berkowitz, 1992; Kielbowicz, 2015; Molotch & Lester, 1974; Schudson, 1986); what news is supposed to look like (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001; Park, 1940); which sources “set the cultural definition of events and problems” (Carlson, 2009, p. 526) and are thus too important to offend and powerful enough to be granted anonymity (Boeyink, 1990; Carlson, 2009, 2011); what owners and publishers allow news to be (Bezanson, 2003b; Breed, 1955; Chomsky, 1999, 2006); and how editors and journalists expect news to be produced (Bennett, 2007; Ryfe, 2006, 2009, 2012).

Reporters “are entitled to select their own facts, draw their own conclusions, and come up with their own evaluations, although they may be edited later” (Gans, 1979, p. 101), but their independence is confined within the relatively narrow realm of operational decisions—who to interview, which quotes to use, and which leads to pursue (Murdock, 1977). This individual, story-level freedom from interference gives journalists considerable discretion within one aspect of practice, but equating it with press autonomy distracts from reporters’ inability to control larger, more powerful allocative forces—fundamental dynamics about how news organizations operate, including which sections a newspaper should have, who should be hired or fired, and what kind of beats should exist (Murdock, 1977). Even when journalists claim that they have the right to make their own story-level judgments free of any hierarchical instruction, “the suggestions of powerful superiors are, in fact, thinly veiled orders” of senior editors (Gans, 1979, p. 101) or publishers whose identities are concealed from reporters (Catledge, 1971; Chomsky, 2006).

Reporters may have had real or imagined freedom from particular influences (Isaiah Berlin’s individually felt and observable “negative freedom”), but their freedom to pursue journalism outside of the frameworks given to them (Berlin’s collectively sustained “positive freedom”) was largely curtailed by forces larger than themselves (Berlin, 1969). Their focus on individual freedom makes it hard to see autonomy as the power to direct collective resources.

Journalism also has historically bracketed the places where reporters expect news to be. Events, locations, and sources usually fit within well-structured rhythms—beats—that organize the production of news (Gans, 1979; Tuchman, 1978). With the exception of long-term, high-risk investigative reporting and earlier eras of foreign correspondence—when seniority and geography gave reporters distance from newsroom daily rhythms and license to exercise judgment (Ettema & Glasser, 1987a; J. M. Hamilton, 2009)—it is difficult for journalists to convince colleagues or audiences that a story can exist separate from a beat or from any of the other criteria that traditionally have defined enterprise news production, such as conflict, timeliness, proximity, prominence, and the unusual (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2014; Stephens, 1988). Stories are far more likely to appear in the news when they can be easily understood “in the context of what has gone before and anticipated in the future” (Molotch & Lester, 1974, p. 101). Journalists are more likely to cover accidents, scandals, surprises, and event emotions that align with newsroom deadlines, editors’ expectations, prize committee standards, and readers’ expectations of what news should be (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2013).

These “strategic rituals” (Tuchman, 1972) of news production are not simply shortcuts for reliably meeting deadlines but also subtle institutional expressions of objectivity’s dominance. When combined with the relationships that journalists cultivated with bureaucracies and reliable sources (M. Fishman, 1980; Sigal, 1973, 1986), these rituals served to “orient man and society”—bounding press freedom to what the profession’s rituals, sources, and norms of objectivity all allowed the “actual world” (Park, 1940, p. 669) to be. Gaye Tuchman (1978) shows how journalists embed themselves within an ideology of objectivity through a set of practices that protects them against charges of bias:

•  Conflicting truth claims: Journalists juxtapose statements from bureaucratically credible sources—high-profile politicians, elite doctors, professors from Ivy League universities, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies—whose authority derives not from journalists’ judgments of their expertise but from society’s sanctioning of these positions.7

•  Attribution: They overtly mark text as originating not from the story’s writer but from sources. Whether quoted or not, named or not, anonymous or pseudo-anonymous, these attribution decisions let journalists strategically make some story elements closer to or further from their own voice.

•  Additional facts: When reporters are uncertain of a story’s lede or lack confidence in possible interpretations of a story, they overwhelm readers with information. By moving their stories closer to research, they simultaneously protect themselves against critiques that their stories lack rigor while offloading any misinterpretations to the research sources.

•  The inverted pyramid: A news story’s largely unquestioned hierarchy puts the most important information at the beginning of an article. It lets reporters simultaneously reenact professional norms (good stories have strong, clear ledes), meet readers’ habits (many people read only headlines or opening paragraphs and expect news to be there), and exercise their freedom to highlight or downplay some story elements over others. The inverted pyramid is a constraint that reporters, editors, and readers rely on—but it also gives journalists the freedom to cast their interpretations selectively and strategically as objective organization.

The journalistic autonomy across Tuchman’s practices is multidimensional—the freedom to cultivate relationships with sources but the need to negotiate with their interests and agendas for being sources; the power to invite sources into stories or broadcasts but the ethical duty to quote them directly or let them speak; the ability to construct balance and shape debates by combining sources with different viewpoints but the ultimate professional obligation to bracket your own interpretations and stay within the bounds of stories that are usually allowed to have only two sides.⁸

In a corollary to Tuchman’s account of journalists’ separations and distances and Cook’s (1998) argument that the press cogoverns with the state, W. Lance Bennett (1990, 1996; Bennett, Lawrence, & Livingston, 2006, 2007) and others (Althaus, 2003; Ryfe, 2006; Zaller & Chiu, 1996) find that the elite press’s celebrated freedom to critique governments is actually limited to what the branches of the state discuss among themselves. Studying press coverage of the Nicaraguan contras funding, the 1985–1986 U.S.-Libya crisis, U.S. foreign policy crises from 1945 to 1991, both Gulf Wars, and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, researchers consistently find that journalists “base stories on official sources; index views according to the magnitude and content of conflicts between these sources; follow the trail of power; narrate stories according to the prevailing customs of the political culture”; and move beyond official sources only when given license by “credible dissenting icons” (Ryfe, 2006, pp. 204–205). The press’s closeness to official sources leads it simply to “index” (Bennett, 1990) debates—tying its “story frames to the range of sources and viewpoints within official decision circles” (Bennett, Lawrence, & Livingston, 2006, p. 468).

If the elite sources that journalists regularly rely on for information do not debate an issue, it is ritualistically incomprehensible and thus virtually invisible to news organizations. To surface stories in the absence of elite debate would mean acknowledging that the press has its own interests that are separate from the discussions among those it covers. If the press separated itself from those it normally depends on, it would break a core ideological tenant of objectivity. This principle requires a different kind of separation—the idea that one of the primary responsibilities of “hard news” is to maintain a distinction between the facts themselves and the values that others use to give facts meaning.

Even when countervailing social movements have emerged that challenge elites, the press has had difficulty acknowledging the legitimacy of these challenges. For example, in studies of the U.S. media’s coverage of the Vietnam War, Hallin (1986) found that most journalism fits within a “sphere of legitimate controversy”—defined by “the parameters of the debate between and within the Democratic and Republican parties” in which “objectivity and balance reign as the supreme journalistic values” (p. 116)—and Todd Gitlin observed the press adhering to a relatively small set of standardized “media frames”:

persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual. Frames enable journalists to process large amounts of information quickly and routinely: to recognize it as information, to assign it to cognitive categories, and to package it for efficient relay to their audiences. (Gitlin, 1980, p. 7)

Political groups learned that, in order to gain the kind of power that comes with national media attention, they needed to submit their own goals, self-narratives, and events “to the implicit rules of newsmaking” and “journalistic notions” of “what a ‘story’ is, what an ‘event’ is, what a ‘protest’ is” (Gitlin, 1980, p. 3). The press’s vision of autonomy as freedom from anything that interferes with its ritualized, objective indexing of elite discourse creates a kind of hegemony in which journalists’ “picture of the world is systematically preferred over others’” (p. 257). The press’s illusion of autonomy as independence thus requires an asymmetry—a dependence on the part of others who must anticipate and align with what they think reporters are expecting to see and with what kind of media frames they think journalists will be most willing to work within.

But not all journalists approach these logics in the same way, as highlighted by James W. Carey’s (1997) distinction between the ideal of a journalist as a “professional communicator” versus “individual interpreter.”⁹ To Carey, professional communicators distance themselves from the story and use rituals of objectivity to claim that its validity comes not from their interpretations or judgments but from the veracity of the information provided to them by sources that they assume that their audiences see as authoritative. At each stage, their individual autonomy is a dance between closeness and distance—getting close enough to a story to understand which sources are relevant; backing away from the story as sources provide interpretation; assembling multiple sources and juxtaposing their accounts; knowing editors and audiences well enough to understand what they think counts as evidence; and backing away from the story, sources, and audiences after a story is published—leaving it to the ill-defined public to decide what should be done because of a story. The professional communicator adheres to an “information ideal” (Schudson, 1978, pp. 88–120) of news; writes stories in simple language that requires no special skill, knowledge, or socioeconomic status to be understood—“elaborated codes” to Basil Bernstein (1962); and strictly follows principles of “fairness, objectivity and scrupulous dispassion” (Schudson, 1978, p. 90). The autonomy of professional communicators is judged according to how well they assemble their separations and dependencies to make this ideal a reality.¹⁰

The individual interpreter, though, is a different kind of journalist who works within a “story ideal” of news (Schudson, 1978, pp. 88–120). In this model, newspapers are sources of entertainment, empathy, and foresight (Belman, 1977). They give readers “satisfying aesthetic experiences” that help them “interpret their own lives and to relate them to the nation, town, or class to which they belong” (Schudson, 1978, p. 89). Journalism was not simply “reporting that put the words and actions of others into simpler language” but principled sense-making that “invested the ordinary with significance” and helped audiences “come to terms with old realities in new ways” (Carey, 1997, p. 137). The authority of interpreters derived not from how well they dispassionately adhered to ideals of ritualized distance and objectivity but how well they situated themselves within stories and audiences. Autonomy was premised not on freedom from interference that corrupted the professional communicator but on a freedom to interpret that, ideally, helped readers relate to stories, understand possible interpretations, and appreciate their shared social conditions.

The professional communicator and individual interpreter, though, are analytical ideals, not empirical realities (M. Weber, 2007). There are, in practice, many ways for professional communicators to behave like individual interpreters periodically—complicating the idea that a professional communicator’s freedom is exclusively individual and negative or that an individual interpreter’s is strictly social and affirmative. Because the press enlists both of these roles (and many variants in between), press autonomy is a mix of people trying variously to be far from or close to practices of interpretation. For example, reporters subtly subvert the language of objectivity, and newsrooms embrace interpretation in the pursuit of workplace diversity.

Theodore L. Glasser and James S. Ettema (1993) describe journalists’ use of irony to “quietly and discretely” (p. 334) pass judgment when “the facts do not ‘speak for themselves’” (p. 322). They analyzed journalist Lou Cannon’s reporting on President Ronald Reagan’s 1985 visit to South Africa during which the president—one of the most powerful bureaucratically credible and socially sanctioned sources—erroneously claimed that the apartheid government had “eliminated” segregation. Cannon was faced with a choice—to echo Reagan’s words (staying close to an ideal of objectivity that requires reporters to report facts and reprint statements while leaving audiences decide their meaning), to juxtapose Reagan’s words with a source who could critique the president’s claim (it would be hard to find an equally weighty source willing to go on the record), or to critique Reagan subtly within his stories using a technique that he knew only some readers would appreciate. He executed the third option by skillfully using quotation marks within the text of his story as “the equivalent of ‘air quotes’ used in spoken conversation to express ironic detachment or even contempt” (p. 332). Cannon’s ironic distancing is a kind of double disinterest in objectivity. Not only is he subtly tearing the president’s words from the context that the president intended (letting Cannon create his own frame), but he also is aligning himself with a more sophisticated subset of the audience that can appreciate the power of textual irony through selective quotation—a “restricted” style of communication that Bernstein (1962) argues is available only to those who have advanced language skills and share disdain for a president who is “not merely ignorant of the state of apartheid in South Africa but confidently unaware of it” (p. 331). Irony becomes a language game that shows the subtleties of press freedom. It frees reporters from the usual norms and standards of objectivity, leaves room for a professional defense (“I’m not biased; I just quoted the president”), lets reporters access an audience that understands the irony, shows how veteran reporters and skillful writers enjoy an extra dimension of autonomy, and invites the reader to see the newspaper as a genre that playfully mixes the information and story ideals.

Similarly, Lisbeth Lipari (1996) shows how journalists can skillfully use stance adverbs to achieve a kind of autonomy that lies somewhere between disinterested neutrality and overt interpretation. Akin to Cannon’s use of irony, she shows how subtly modified action words can help sophisticated writers and attentive readers share interpretations. Her analysis of wire stories shows how reporters use words “such as obviously, clearly, apparently, and presumably” to “convey something about [their] attitude toward the facts at hand” (p. 821). She finds that writers use the word obviously to give “focus, emphasis, and legitimacy” to a reporter’s story (“An obviously elated Marlon Brando hugged his eldest son”); signal “logical, causal, or common sense inferences” that they see as indisputable (“For President Bush, the stunning putdown of Saddam Hussein is obviously good political news”); or to “redirect or reorient [an] interpretation and information flow” (“The President obviously cannot make the U.S. decisions in a vacuum”) (pp. 824–826). These interpretive moves—subtle and accessible only to those skilled enough to write and read them—let reporters simultaneously insert themselves into a story and align themselves with a set of unassailable facts.

Autonomy is not a disinterested separation from events, the freedom to overtly advocate, or a strict adherence to a subset of terminology deemed to be acceptably objective. Rather, it is the flexibility to use language to guide audiences toward events and ways of thinking about them.

Beyond individual reporters’ freedom to skirt objectivity by creatively addressing sophisticated audiences, news organizations historically have struggled with the logic of reflecting diversity in style guidelines and in hiring policies in a profession that supposedly brackets the news and its practitioners within norms of objectivity. Facts are facts that reporters report, regardless of who they are. But the 1968 Kerner Report—commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate causes of civil unrest—“warned that the ‘press has too long basked in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and a white perspective.’” The Society of Professional Journalists’ 2002 Diversity Committee called multicultural newsrooms “‘essential to an informed public and democracy itself’” (Glasser, Awad, & Kim, 2009, p. 58). The Associated Press and the New York Times have repeatedly updated their style guides in light of their perceptions of new norms for describing social groups—such as by changing how they describe members of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities (GLAAD, 2014). And in 1988, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and the Native American Journalists Association united to form the group Unity, which was charged with “increasing the numbers of journalists of color to better reflect the actual composition of the American population and improving the ‘representation’ of people of color in the news” (Benson, 2005, p. 5). In short, the press itself—in its hiring practices, language policies, and professional associations—defines its autonomy not as generic reporters’ independence from outside forces interfering with the production of objective news but as an ongoing, field-level conversation about which kinds of diversity it requires, which kinds it can ignore, and which kinds of public obligations it recognizes and hires for.

This brief history of the sociology of journalistic practices shows that press autonomy comes not from individual reporters breaking free of superiors or sources but through subtle, ritualistic negotiation of mutual dependencies. Reporters need beats, routines of balance, norms of language, and bureaucratic authority in order to organize their work, meet deadlines, cultivate relationships with sources, and perform their identities as professional communicators who let the public decide for itself. But if they can subtly interpret events and reflect changing social norms within the bounds of journalistic professionalism, they are sometimes able or expected to subvert the routines of objectivity—writing complex, nuanced stories that sophisticated audiences will understand, letting personal judgments of bureaucratically credible sources shine through, and diversifying their newsrooms with reporters who can situate neutral pursuits of stories and facts within personal investments and identities.

Autonomy through Bracketing Publics

As much as the press defines its autonomy through ideologies of objectivity and rituals of news making, it also shows why it thinks it needs institutional autonomy as it relies on, cultivates, and separates itself from the audiences that consume its news. That is, journalists have historically left clues about how they have understood the public purpose of their autonomy as they included and excluded audiences in their work or explanations of why they say they do their work.

Sometimes journalists have understood the public simply as those people who are interested in whatever they find interesting. They write “for their superiors and for themselves” (Gans, 1979, p. 230) or, as Robert Darnton (1975, pp. 182–188) describes it, for “the inner circle of a reporter’s public.” This circle includes not only other reporters and editors at the reporter’s paper but those seen as competitors at other papers, friends and family members who might read the stories, reporters who are no longer practicing but who are seen as past masters of the craft, and sources and subjects who regularly appear in the paper’s stories. This is the reference group for reporters’ understanding of professional freedom—those that they see themselves responsible to as professional communicators and those that they imagine might be upset when they strike out on their own as individual interpreters.

At other times, though, journalists have a “fear of the audience” (Gans, 1979, p. 235). When reminded of the large, unknowable mass of people who may encounter their stories or the responsibility of providing “the democratic public” with what it needs to know, journalists demur and return to more familiar audiences: “If audience wants were considered, journalistic news judgment would go by the wayside” (p. 235) as they became paralyzed with responsibility.

Although they may seek informal feedback from friendly nonjournalists—a “known audience” of friends, neighbors, and family members (Gans, 1979, p. 236)—journalists cope with the responsibility of serving a large public by dismissing the audience members they do encounter. Readers who write letters to the editor are seen as a necessary evil. They serve as evidence that the paper is producing news that attracts attention and elicits feedback, but editors see those who write within an “idiom of insanity” (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2002) and see consideration of their feedback as a largely performative exercise.

Similarly, some papers bracketed much of their audience relationship within an “ombudsman” or “reader representative” position. First appearing in U.S. newspapers in the mid-1960s as part of an attempt to establish credibility with readers, the ombudsman was “typically a senior editor equipped with the authority to investigate complaints and get answers for readers” (Nemeth, 2003, p. 2). The ombudsman had to maintain sufficient distance from journalists, editors, and owners to sustain an ongoing critique of a particular news organization and the journalistic profession (Meyers, 2000) but could not appear overly sympathetic to all readers’ concerns for fear of losing access to newsrooms. The ideal ombudsman, Andrew R. Cline (2008) argues, is not an “omniscient journalist” who simply tells journalists what they should have done or lectures readers on how newspapers “really” work. Rather, the ideal ombudsman is a self-reflective, “privileged reader” whose first mission is to critique the paper’s integrity by critically examining its reporting practices as an experienced outsider.

More commonly, though, the ombudsman has been more symbolic than substantive. A national survey comparing the reporting of journalists who worked at papers with ombudsmen versus the reporting of those at papers without found that a reporter’s age—not the presence of an ombudsman—was a better predictor of whether he or she would engage in what the survey described as “controversial newsgathering techniques” (Pritchard, 1993, p. 77). When papers do have ombudsmen, journalists tended not to share complaints they receive from readers and were more likely to ignore or hide negative feedback (Bezanson, Cranberg, & Soloski, 1987). This finding supports Kate McKenna’s (1993) argument that ombudsmen isolate reporters from readers because they outsource the sense of public responsibility that, he argues, should be within a reporter’s personal work ethic. Finally and perhaps most damaging, James S. Ettema and Theodore L. Glasser (1987b) found that ombudsmen’s own understandings of their roles were so inflected with persuasive, public relations logics—stating, for example, that the “single most important aspect of their job” is to “give readers a sense that the newspaper cares about them” (p. 7)—that they were more likely to represent the paper’s interests to the readers rather than be critical liaisons or cultural bridges between the news organization and its publics. In one high-profile moment when an ombudsman might have held his own paper accountable on behalf of readers, he was ignored. When the New York Times public editor Byron Calame asked executive editor Bill Keller to explain why he had held a story for over a year at the request of the George W. Bush administration, Keller replied: “There is really no way to have a full discussion of the back story without talking about when and how we knew what we knew, and we can’t do that” (Calame, 2006, n.p.).

Perceived as a way to bring the press and audiences closer and foster professional accountability—an ostensible curb on the press’s freedom from audiences—the ombudsman role was largely symbolic and performative.

Journalists defend such distancing as a practical way to manage the power that comes with being “self-appointed and unaccountable audience representatives” (Gans, 1979, p. 238). To exercise the judgment that it assumes to be correct, the press needs to bracket audiences as “a receptacle to be informed by experts and an excuse for the practice of publicity” (Carey, 1995, pp. 391–392). As long as it can contain public participation in news production and describe the public on its terms—making its accounts of the world appear natural and self-evident—the press can create strategically circular rituals that equate its interests with the public’s interests. The press becomes a caretaker press that “justifies itself in the public’s name but in which the public plays no [significant] role” (Carey, 1995, p. 391). Largely absent from a press predicated on sustaining its freedom by distancing itself from audiences is sophisticated professional self-reflection on the press’s power to make—not reflect—publics through its uncontested rituals.

The type of autonomy the press says it needs reveals the type of public it thinks it is supporting (Baker, 2002, pp. 129–153). Beginning in the Progressive Era, the press came to be seen as a vehicle for informed citizenship. If audiences had good data produced by professional journalists, then citizens could claim their rights, hold elites accountable, and rationally assemble themselves into publics that gave informed consent to be governed (Schudson, 1998). The press is service-oriented. Its job is to sense, respond to, and meet public desires for information within a largely market-oriented system in which “consumers’ desires drive news coverage” (J. T. Hamilton, 2006, p. 7). In market-oriented journalism (McManus, 1994, pp. 4–5),

•  Consumers define news’ quality and value through their choices;

•  Products judged to be quality drive other products from the market;

•  Self-correcting forces produce information that consumers lack when entrepreneurs identify market opportunities;

•  Producers are under constant pressure to create the appearance of new, improved goods that are seen as better than competitors’;

•  Scarce resources like cultural and economic capital go to producers that consumers consider to be valuable; and

•  Consumers are always free to choose among products without coercion.

In this model—most closely associated with a “competitive” model of democracy “through which individuals, acting alone or in concert with others, build support for what they want” (Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, & White, 2009, p. 94)—the public is an aggregation of individual citizens expressing personal preferences. It consists of information clients for whom the press produces commodities—but only those commodities that consumers want. Market-based publics give news organizations a kind of autonomy consistent with the ideology of objectivity. Because journalists are beholden to no identifiable set of interests that might interfere with their editorial judgments—they follow market dynamics—their rituals of disinterested, factual reporting are simply institutional manifestations of what their clients demand. The press’s objectivity-centered autonomy is intact because it can align itself with market forces that also are seen to lack ideology. As former Federal Communications Commission chair Mark Flower said: “the public interest is that which interests the public” (cited in Hallin, 2000, p. 234), and state regulators “should rely on the broadcasters’ ability to determine the wants of their audiences through the normal mechanisms of the marketplace” (Fowler & Brenner, 1982, p. 210). The free press is a free market, and any malfunction is a market failure.

This separation from the state and alignment with the markets does give the press freedom from overt influence by government censors or nonmarket funders, but it creates a new set of dependencies that can hinder journalistic autonomy. First, markets tend to reward choice among goods but not necessarily diversity among products. It is easier for producers to earn market share and thrive if the number of competitors is small, if product differentiation is clear, and if competition centers on a few, discrete, easily measurable features. If products differ too much or if the differences cannot be discerned, then it becomes hard for producers and consumers alike to build a language of competition and choice. The result is a kind of “contract failure” (Hansmann, 1980; D. R. Young, 2015) between producers and consumers that drives producers to decrease product quality and leads people to make decisions based not on a rational self-interest in acquiring the information they need to consent to governance but on a host of other factors (for- or not-for-profit status, brand identity, peer recommendations) that fit poorly with the idea that audiences are focused on rationally seeking out, evaluating, and applying the objective information that journalists provide. Journalists’ freedom to create publics is limited by the market’s ability to prevent collusion, break up information monopolies, differentiate products, communicate meaningful differences among choices, distribute information equitably, and enable rational choice (Baker, 1998, 2002; J. T. Hamilton, 2006). It matters little if journalists want publics to emerge from informed citizenship if their autonomy depends on failing information markets that they lack the power to fix.

Second, when markets are working, journalists must confine their work within frameworks of competition defined by their peers. They must learn which factors their bosses, audiences, competitors, and coworkers see as proprietary and advantageous and orient their work toward these elements to ensure that their stories and reputation thrive in the market. This creates a “scoop and shun” phenomenon. Journalists are more likely to produce stories that are timely (it is easy to recognize which news organization published a story first, so time becomes an easy marker of market success) or stories that purposefully ignore what a competitor has reported or first discovered (to do so would be to acknowledge a competitor’s dominance) (Glasser & Gunther, 2005). It is also hard for journalists to tell when a market has produced the definitive account, when competition should move on to a new topic, how authority on one issue translates to another, what standards markets must meet for certainty, and how long markets are willing to wait for such closure (Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2008). Largely lost in these dynamics is the bargain journalists make in tying their autonomy to competitive markets that are supposed to produce informed citizenship and enlightened self-governance.

Third, even if markets function and competition thrives, news is a fundamentally different kind of product compared to other commodities. It is nonrivalrous (consuming news does not prevent others from consuming news), largely nonexcludable (although subscribers often have first or privileged access, it is difficult to stop people from consuming news), depends on revenue from two-sided markets (advertisers and subscribers underwrite it), has benefits that extend beyond sellers and buyers (even those who never consume news benefit from living in societies with those who do), and its purchase both reflects and shapes preferences (people might seek out news they want, but consuming news often changes people and their ideas about what they think they want next) (Baker, 2002, pp. 7–19). If the press is to produce, circulate, and help audiences make sense of news, it needs freedom from thinking about itself as just an information marketplace and ways of framing the exceptional nature of its products.

Ensuring that the press had the institutional freedom to explore its unique qualities drove a major media reform movement in the United States in the 1940s. As Victor Pickard chronicles, a host of initiatives tried to limit the power of commercial media within normative, democratic aims:

a cluster of progressive court decisions and policy interventions, including the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) 1943 anti-monopoly measures against chain broadcasters, which forced NBC to divest itself of a major network; the Supreme Court’s 1945 antitrust ruling against the Associated Press, which affirmed the government’s duty to encourage in the press “diverse and antagonistic sources”; the 1946 “Blue Book,” which mandated broadcasters’ public service responsibilities; the 1947 Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press, which established journalism’s democratic benchmarks; and, finally, the 1949 Fairness Doctrine, which outlined key public interest obligations for broadcasters. (Pickard, 2014a, p. 3)

Indeed, the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press (1947, p. 79) defined its mission as to “free the press from the influences which now prevent it from supplying the communication of news and ideas needed by the kind of society we have and the kind of society we desire.” Instead of seeing markets as competitive mechanisms for disinterestedly producing, circulating, and evaluating information—a mission ostensibly aligned with the scientized press’s goal to be an arm’s-length curator of quality information that bracketed its role to truth telling without interpretation—reformers argued that a free press needed freedom from commercial forces that produced monopolies, minimize diversity, and limited to the press as yet another business.

The press’s freedom, they argued, required relationships to commerce that subordinated the market’s “egoistic concerns to the public good” and that prioritized “welfare, individual and collective” (Held, 2006, p. 43) over commercial success. The U.S. colonial press thought public interests surfaced through political partisanship (Nerone, 2015), the penny press used objectivity to appeal to mass markets that stood in for publics (Schiller, 1979; Schudson, 2001), and the “scientized” press served public interests by resisting propaganda through the professionalized, neutral segregation of facts and values (Hallin, 2000). Eventually, the ideal press envisioned by post–World War II media reformers ambitiously “prioritized the collective rights of the public’s ‘freedom to read, see, and hear’ over the individual rights of media producers and owners” (Pickard, 2014a, p. 4).11

But what was this public, and how were its collective rights to be determined? As post–World War II social scientists and humanists showed, prioritizing “the public” could mean more than simply exposing people to information through markets. By moving from a marketplace model of press independence to one premised on cultivating the collective rights of publics, the press encountered an opportunity and challenge. Journalists and publishers were free to imagine their profession as more than just the production of information that markets could value. They had to have some idea of what collective welfare meant independent of markets and what their role was in creating publics. It was free to imagine audiences as being more than customers or citizens, and it was free to use its field of forces and forms of capital to advocate for one kind of public over another. But it also meant investing its authority and legitimacy in different meanings of public that were contingent, contentious, and carrying new expectations of the press. If press freedom was about separating from markets, then it simultaneously had to be about aligning with some other set of ideas.

An experiment in such alignment took shape in the United States in the 1990s under the auspices of the “public journalism” movement. Some newspapers invented new organizational forms, reporting techniques, and principles of audience engagement to bring journalists closer to the readers, ostensibly grounding their professionalism in the communities they served. For example, the beat system was replaced with a “reporting circle” in which reporters collaborated on a variety of broad themes identified through community consultation (including individual quality of life, city values and governance, and personal leisure) (Johnson, 1998). Reporters also were encouraged to convene focus groups to uncover issues not getting attention, solicit questions from readers that reporters could then ask of officials, look for sources with moderate views and not extreme opinions, frame coverage in terms of people’s daily experiences instead of officials’ policy priorities, use emotions to explain how people arrive at positions instead of merely as added “color,” foreground the values that sources bring to issues, equally weigh the experiences of nonexperts with the knowledge of experts, explain why citizens should care about an issue, and encourage them to take action and design solutions (Gillmor, 2004; Glasser & Lee, 2002; Rosen, 1999; Willey, 1998).

These experiments largely assumed that community nostalgia for the processes of public journalism had inherent civic value, without critically asking what kind of publics emerged. By closely aligning itself with readers’ priorities, nonexpert opinions, and community politics, the press certainly gave visibility to voices that had not been heard before, but in doing so, it left a vacuum. It ceded the journalistic expertise and professional judgment that underpinned its claims to professional autonomy without saying why the publics made by public journalism were better than the publics it could create through distance from audiences:

By denying the press the authority to set its own agenda, public journalism substitutes the community’s judgement, however defined, for the judgement of journalists; it confuses “community” values with good values, as though the former always implies the latter.… It deprives the press of an opportunity—and diminishes the importance of its obligation—to set forth, clearly and convincingly, its politics. (Glasser, 2000, pp. 684–685)

It is exceedingly difficult to hold the press accountable—that is, to demand that it create an account of and take responsibility for its power—as an institution if its journalists are indistinguishable from their communities. Some separation from communities is required if the press is to do more than simply reflect community conversations.¹²

Public journalism’s failure to enact a coherent vision of the public that was demonstrably better than what the press already had been making highlights a long-standing question in media studies research—how the press makes publics by convening and managing audiences.¹³ For example, a negative view of liberty expects the press to uses its freedoms to be “partisan and segmented,” mobilize members of preexisting groups, cover “crises and campaigns,” and be a “check on power by alerting citizens to problems.” But an affirmative view of liberty expects the press to use its freedom to facilitate deliberation, amplify particular debates, and serve “as a forum for debate and discussion” (Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, & White, 2009, p. 97).

If the press sees its freedom as more than independence from markets and sees individual liberty as a collective achievement, then it implicitly has a normative image of the public that forms the basis of the test of whether that version of press freedom should be defended. The press must say exactly how it understands the potential for audiences to become publics if its separations and dependencies are to be normatively defensible. For example, the press might see the public it serves as some combination of these distinct but overlapping models:

•  A rational, information-focused body that creates legitimate collective outcomes by making “occasions for consumers to identify with the public positions” (Calhoun, 1992, pp. 13–26) of those who agree to bracket their personal identities and follow procedures of deliberation, debate, and voting (J. Cohen, 1997; Fishkin, 2009; Gutman & Thompson, 2004; Habermas, 1989; Popkin, 1994);

•  A social good achieved through multifaceted, participatory media cultures (Couldry & Jenkins, 2014; Jenkins, 1992; Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013; Kelty et al., 2015; Livingstone & Das, 2013; Mansbridge, 1999; Pateman, 1970) in which “individual and collective identities are reshaped” and “alternative conceptions of what is good are brought to the fore” (Calhoun, 1998, p. 21);

•  A quantified aggregation of people constructed and sampled through survey techniques, opinion polls, voting, or citizen modeling that rationalizes social groups into discrete demographic patterns (Bouk, 2015; Herbst, 1995; Igo, 2007; Page & Shapiro, 1992);

•  An outgrowth of symbolic and material associations (Fung, 2003; Marres, 2012; Warren, 2000) that people cannot individually extract themselves from and that motivate those “who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions … to have those consequences systematically cared for” (Dewey, 1954, pp. 15–16);

•  A “sphere of publics” (Haas, 2004) or “decentered” space that is not a “comfortable place of conversation among those who share language, assumptions, and ways of looking at issues” (I. M. Young, 2000, p. 111) but a diverse body of “differently situated voices” speaking “across their difference” who are “accountable to one another” (p. 107);

•  An “agonistic” body that rejects the “consensual approach” of “‘dialogue’ and ‘deliberation’” in favor of a “sphere of contestation where different hegemonic political projects can be confronted” (Mouffe, 2005, pp. 3–4);

•  Explicitly “alternative” (Atton & Hamilton, 2008) groups formed through “conflict with the norms and contexts of their cultural environment” (Warner, 2005, p. 62) and in “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser, 1990, p. 67);

•  A private “enclave” of marginalized communication that survives by “hiding [its] counterhegemonic ideas and strategies in order to survive and avoid sanctions, while internally producing lively debate and planning” (Squires, 2002, p. 448); and

•  A “recursive” social group defined by “a shared, profound concern for the technical and legal conditions of possibility for their own association” (Kelty, 2005, p. 185) whose existence is predicated on the power to imagine and realize new forms of itself.

Press freedom is both a requirement and diagnostic of publicness. The press needs to have an image of the public in order to explain why it needs the autonomy it claims, and conversely, whenever the press defines or defends its institutional freedom, such justifications can be read as evidence of the kind of public it thinks its autonomy makes possible.

Depending on which kind of public the press aligns itself with, it will see its power and responsibility to create separations and dependencies as in service of a particular public. If the press is a field of forces and if its freedom entails more than just a freedom from state interference or the limited commercial freedom afforded by marketplaces, then press freedom exists only as a network—as a set of separations and dependencies that configure the press into a field that makes certain kinds of publics more likely than others. That is, any defense of press freedom is inextricable from two follow-up questions: what kind of public does that network of press freedom make, and is that a normatively defensible public? If either question is answered unacceptably—or met with silence—it is impossible to know why press freedom is being defended at all.

Throughout these phases of U.S. journalism—an early embrace of professionalized objectivity, an encoding of objectivity within organizational routines, and a struggle both to account for and separate from audiences—the dynamics of press autonomy have been largely hidden and embedded in institutional relationships whose entirety cannot be viewed from any single perspective.

Conclusion

This chapter has argued that the press has never been a single, stable entity but instead has been an ever-changing product of a field of dynamic forces. The press is not a solitary entity that has freedom from anything but is an ongoing product of separations and dependencies. At various points in history, it has aligned itself with, interpreted, or eschewed facts over values, an ideology of objectivity, state sponsorship, marketplace legitimacy, audience engagement, and expert sources through a variety of reporting techniques, organizational rituals, educational initiatives, professional associations, hiring practices, linguistic strategies, and institutional experiments. It makes little sense to talk about freedom of the press when the press itself is a contingency and its freedom is made up of many dynamic separations and dependencies.

Press freedom is better thought of as a network state whose legitimacy depends on its normative conceptions of publics. In the spirit of Michael Schudson’s (2005) question “autonomy from what?,” I suggest asking “autonomy for what?” Instead of asking whether a static model of the press deserves its freedom from an unknown set of influences to pursue a right to speak, my aim has been to flip this question on its head: what subset of relationships making up the press creates a public we want to defend normatively, and how can we redefine press freedom as the separations and dependencies that make those relationships and those publics possible? Because the field of forces structuring the press is never static, the answer to this question is never settled. The question “freedom for what?” is not a test to be passed but a heuristic meant as a normative guide to networked forces.

In the previous chapter, I argue that democratic self-governance requires both an individual right to speak and a public right to hear. My aim was to highlight the idea that liberty is a collective achievement, not only an individual right—a dual reading of autonomy. As promised in the introduction to this chapter, I ask this dualism to do double duty: just as individual liberty requires conditions of collectivity, so too does the press’s institutional freedom. As this tour of some of the press’s historical, institutional dynamics has tried to show, the press’s potential to realize a particular type of public is never about being entirely separate from states, markets, audiences, or sources. Its institutional power always depends on others—markets that fund its work, readers who understand a reporter’s ironic wink, audiences whose interests respond to and align with what journalists care about, sources who quickly say what journalists on deadline expect them to say, colleagues and competitors who do not stray from professional patterns, and bureaucracies that reliably produce people and information understood as authoritative. And because press autonomy is, ideally, in the service of democratic governance, these dualistic notions of individual and institutional autonomy are further intertwined. Imagining and realizing a life beyond what a person can achieve individually requires an institutional press with a freedom to realize publics beyond what its freedom from others might let it create.

Today, this interplay between individual self-governance and institutional press autonomy is taking shape in a new context defined by forces different from those in past eras of the press. In this “state of permanent novelty” or “habitus of the new” (Papacharissi & Easton, 2013, p. 172), sociotechnical systems are designed and deployed by people who do not think of themselves as members of the press, organizations are driven by technological innovation and advertising revenue over journalistic missions, and hybrid media systems consist of boundary-spanning actor networks that resists any easy categorization as either journalistic or nonjournalistic. Autonomy as an ideal is still a tension between agency and structure—freedom from that enables individual action and freedom to that comes from inextricable relationships—but the form of the press’s agency and structure is changing.

In the next chapter, I consider the idea of press freedom in light of these forces of structure and agency, read the contemporary networked press’s sociotechnical infrastructures for evidence of separations and dependencies, and ask how well this new system of relationships helps achieve not only the right to speak (which historically has dominated liberal, individualistic notions of freedom) but also a public right to hear (which requires the kind of collectivity that the less popular affirmative interpretation of the First Amendment promised). Because the field of forces defining the press is now occupied and increasingly dominated by new entrants with different illusios, different types of capital, different scales of production, and different visions of publicness, the moment is ripe to reconsider the idea of press freedom beyond simple calls for “transparency, diversity and openness” (Karppinen & Moe, 2016, p. 115). Instead, press freedom might be defined more ambitiously as a network’s responsibility to create affirmative, collective liberty—to create the kind of “proper distance” (Silverstone, 2003) that, depending on the type of public you want, you need the press to have.

Again, the dualistic concept of autonomy as freedom from and freedom to does double duty. For the press to help create both individual liberty and collective self-governance, its own institutional autonomy must be seen not simply as its freedom from undue influences that interfere with journalists’ rights to report and publish but as the relationships it needs to have—most urgently, with new technologies and audiences—if it is to be an institution for democratic self-governance and not just content publishing. The next chapter tries to connect the ideals of listening and a public right to hear to the image of press freedom developed here as separations and dependencies, using an ideal of press freedom as a public right to hear as a diagnostic to ask: how can the autonomy of the networked press be understood and defended as the ability of its sociotechnical relationships to ensure a public right to hear?

Notes

1. The notion of possibility infuses much of the study of structures of social organization. Bourdieu’s phrase “space of possibles” echoes Lewin’s concept of “possible life spaces” and presages John F. Padgett and Walter W. Powell’s (2012, p. 4) study of the new organizations emerging from a “topology of the possible.” Given that, at any particular moment, field-level institutional forces make only certain concepts of free press possible, my aim is to move toward a study of press freedom in which these possibilities might be read as more or less desirable—for example, as helping or harming a public right to hear.

2. Bourdieu means laws not in a narrow sense of formal, state-authored regulations but as a general term describing the actions and dispositions that socially constructed norms consider to be more or less permissible. Similarly, capital means not only currency or commodities but also socially created resources (like reputation, class, and family lineage) that can be recognized both in formal systems (such as military ranks, university degrees, and caste systems that create clear hierarchies) and in informal, implicit ways (for example, a worker’s perceived value in an interview setting may be a function not only of her employment history and letters of reference but also her dress, accent, demeanor, and the reputations of others who may have similar work histories or educational backgrounds).

3. See Pierre Marlière (2000) and Schudson (2005) for particularly pointed critiques.

4. There has been no modern historical shortage of inquiry into how the press and political systems enable each other—essentially, era-specific attempts to answer field-level questions like “Why is the press as it is?” (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, p. 2) and “What type of free press does democracy need and why does democracy need it?” (Baker, 2002, p. 125). In his critical study of the communicative forces that created and sustained nationalism and colonialism, Benedict Anderson (1983, p. 62) describes how early newspapers emerged by creating an “imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers.” In the aftermath of the press’s failure to challenge government accounts of World War I, Walter Lippmann (1920, p. 11) argued that “All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true, if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news.” In applying Chicago School social theories to that era’s version of community journalism, Robert E. Park (1923, p. 669) claimed that the “extent to which news circulates determines the extent to which the members of a society participate in its political action.” As part of his worry that profit-driven journalism would impoverish democratic societies, John Dewey (1935/2004, p. 209) worried that a “public, debauched by the ideal of getting away with whatever it can, will hardly turn away from a press that is getting away with murder.” In their survey of Cold War era journalism—an implicit celebration of Western, liberal media policy (Nerone, 1995)—Fred Seaton Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm (1963, p. 1) trace how the press “takes on the form and coloration of the social and political structures within which it operates”—structures that Victor Pickard (2014a, p. 3) shows had just been settled on after a particularly vibrant “decade of transition and reform” in U.S. media policymaking during which “national and geopolitical power relations were in flux.” Even more narrowly focused sociological and ethnographic studies of the press are usually motivated by journalism’s democratic essence: “I sought to study what this society tells itself about itself through the news and why” (Gans, 1979, p. xxi); local journalism’s “vision of itself … is a noble vision of tremendous democratic importance” (C. W. Anderson, 2013a, p. 3); “journalism will always express the dominant sensibilities of the public culture in which it is practiced” (Ryfe, 2012, p. 18).

5. For an argument that attempts to construct a general theory of communicative normativity using Bourdieu’s notions of field, habitus, and capital, see Liane Tessa Rothenberger, Claudia Auer, and Cornelius B. Pratt (2017).

6. Cook’s (1998) account is focused on what Robert M. Entman (2005) calls the “traditional journalism” of reporters who adhere to five key standards of news production—accuracy and factual claim making, the balance and separation of personal views, the allowing of news judgments to override profit considerations, a focus on checking sources of power, and the separation of news and editorial staffs. He contrasts this reporting against advocacy journalism that has a change-making agenda, tabloid journalism that is designed for profit, amusement, and policy influence, and entertainment that is targeted to meet the desires of audiences. These categories are not mutually exclusive—and are implicitly critiqued by Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, and White (2009)—but they help to narrow the claims Cook makes about the press’s field-level patterns.

7. Bourdieu (1996a, p. 35) called them “good guests” who “you can always invite because you know they’ll be good company and won’t create problems.”

8. The press actually limits its authority and relevance when it tries to retain the illusion of independence—when it hews too closely to the idea that all stories have two sides, that all bureaucratically credible sources need balancing, and that journalistic interpretations unacceptably mix facts and values. For example, in their study of the coverage of climate change debates by the U.S. “prestige press” (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal), Maxwell T. Boykoff and Jules M. Boykoff (2004) observed the papers consistently juxtaposing widespread scientific consensus that global warming is caused by humans with claims by “big oil companies, conservative policy research organizations and trade associations” (p. 133) that the science was unproven: “This bias, hidden behind the veil of journalistic balance,” created “both discursive and real political space for the U.S. government to shirk responsibility and delay action” (p. 134).

9. In terms of broader communication theories, the information ideal might best be thought of in terms of a transmission model in which messages are “transmitted and distributed in space for the control of distance and people” (Carey, 1989a, p. 15), where communications are successful if a receiver gets an exact copy of a sender’s message (W. Weaver & Shannon, 1963), while the story ideal might be considered closer to a ritual model in which communication functions to maintain society, construct meaning, negotiate among beliefs, and discover shared consequences of communal living (Carey, 1989a, p. 18; Dewey, 1954).

10. The value of such reporting traditions, steeped in a professionalized goal of objectivity, is debatable and not universal among reporters. Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini (2004) report that an expectation of objectivity can make reporters less autonomous within the global profession. European journalists “would say that the Americans were ‘unprofessional’ because they were so constrained by the routines of balance and ‘objectivity’ that they didn’t exercise independent judgment” (p. 226).

11. Although the Hutchins Commission is often remembered as a unique call for press accountability distinct from the forces of commercial markets, its members were by no means aligned in their understandings of freedom. Because it “agreed on publishing a report … with a single voice,” the Commission’s report “often speaks in generalities that result from compromise” (Christians & Fackler, 2014, p. 339). The outgoing chair of Harvard’s philosophy department, William Hocking, advocated that the press embrace “social responsibility theory” (seeing press accountability in terms of its duty to others), while Zechariah Chafee Jr. favored a “liberal emphasis on [press] rights and a suspicion of government action” that might limit their exercise in the name of collective action (p. 339). Harold Lasswell advocated that the report compromise and “endorse both negative and positive liberty” (Nerone, 1995, pp. 93–94).

12. See Miranda Joseph (2002) for an excellent discussion of the dangers of grounding images of public life too deeply within a “romance of community.”

13. This is a large and nuanced body of literature, but for excellent overviews, see C. Edwin Baker (2002), Richard Butsch (2008), Christians, Glasser, McQuail Nordenstreng, and White (2009), James S. Ettema and David Charles Whitney (1994), Hallin and Mancini (2004), Sonia Livingstone (2013), and Philip M. Napoli (2011).