THE RULES OF THE JOURNALISTIC FIELD - BOURDIEU,PIERRE CONTRIBUTION TOTHE SOCIOLOGY OF THE MEDIA

Pierre Bourdieu's recent research on the media offers a valuable altho ugh somewhat inconsistent appraisal of what he describes as the 'journ alistic field'. The French sociologist applies his main conceptual too ls to the media - and more particularly to television - in order to sh ed light on hidden forms of domination and symbolic violence exercised by television. He emphasizes that market journalism has become a thre at to the autonomy of fields endowed with specific rules and capital, such as the academic and the political fields. Bourdieu insists that i t is this process that endangers democracy. This article proposes a cr itical assessment of Bourdieu's sociology of television. Despite a gen erally sympathetic account, it stresses the epistemological weakness o f his work and argues that it is difficult to understand the recent ev olution of the French journalistic field - Bourdieu's main case study - without paying more attention to the impact of the political field o n the media than Bourdieu does. While ultimately welcoming his stimula ting analysis of the overlapping of the political, academic and journa listic fields, the article stresses that Bourdieu's negative diagnosis of television is largely to be explained by his erroneous tackling of 'journalists' as a homogeneous category.