Journalism in a Fractured World
Summary
"This timely work is essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of where society – and journalism – is heading." Matt Carlson, Professor of Journalism, University of Minnesota
"Eldridge provides an analytical framework that I am convinced will be of use to everybody concerned with the plurality of news actors and what they mean in our fractured societies." Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk, Professor in Journalism, OsloMet University
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- book About the author(s)/editor(s)
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- Figures and tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Acknowledged contributions
- Chapter 1. Our fractured worlds
- Chapter 2. Liberal, deliberative, and agonistic: Theories for a pluralist democracy
- Chapter 3. Agonistic journalism: Making sense of a fractured field
- Chapter 4. News of our fractured worlds: Journalism as societal discourse
- Chapter 5. Metajournalistic discourses: Expanding the aperture
- Chapter 6. Unheard, in a noisy world
- Chapter 7. Affirm, affect, affront, aggrieve: Counterpublic narratives
- Chapter 8. Agonism and antagonism: Journalism in a fractured world
- Appendix: Methods & data sampling
- Bibliography
- Index
Preface
This book is among the first in the Frontiers in Journalism Studies series with Peter Lang. The aim of the series is straightforward: journalism as a field, and journalism studies as a way to make sense of it, both face the challenge of trying to keep pace with a range of developments. Both journalism and journalism studies have been buffeted by new and mostly digital changes in content, journalistic production, media technologies, business models, political pressures, and audience interest. There are also still unfolding challenges around algorithms, data and privacy, and platforms that need to be made sense of. The challenges facing journalism are many, and the changes have been significant. But changes can be made sense of, and even the most novel challenges come from somewhere.
The Frontiers in Journalism Studies series embraces this as an opportunity to understand journalism’s place in society as we try to make sense of its future. Some titles will revisit foundational theories and ideas we have held close, examining old ideas through new lenses, while others will introduce new ways of thinking about journalism for the coming decades. As a collection of ideas, the books in this series will engage with different challenges that journalism scholars need to consider as they continue to make sense of journalism’s place in our societies, so we are better equipped to explore these in journalism’s uncertain digital futures.
Journalism in a Fractured World embraces this ambition by drawing from established theoretical and conceptual lenses that have guided journalism studies research for many years, building from these to introduce new ways of thinking about what journalism is, and what it might become. The discussions here expand on arguments I have explored in previous work considering the journalistic field, its changing boundaries in a digital age, and the role of discourse in shaping our ideas about what journalism is. Here, I use these to situate our discussion of a fragmented journalistic field within a society that is being actively fractured, where political divisions and a sense of disconnect found in society are being replicated in our thinking, and talking, about journalism and its place in our increasingly fractured worlds.
Acknowledgments
Writing this book was far more difficult than I thought it would be, and it would not be in front of you without the support of those who saw potential in the idea and encouraged me to develop and finish this project.
In New England, where I’m from, there’s something called the “dooryard visit” to describe a chat between one person standing at their front door and the other standing next to their parked car, some distance away. These brief chats give meaning to fleeting moments, forcing a pause that allows you to collect your thoughts. My thanks go to Frank Harbers for so many of these conversations—me standing at the threshold of his office, Frank at his desk—that helped focus my ideas as I developed this book. And to Rik Smit, who comes at these discussions from another angle. To Marcel Broersma, who has continued to be a welcome sounding board for ideas and a source of well-placed encouragement, thanks for poking holes in ideas that need to be improved upon and boosting those that deserve attention. And to Marc, who in the final moments of revision helped me refine a narrative around fracturing and fragmentation in the context of polarization. Of course, colleagues are not simply ideas factories, and Joëlle, Rob, Susan, David, Bart, and so many others have made it all the easier to take pauses in the all-consuming process of writing. My thanks also goes to Giulia Trentacosti with the University of Groningen Library. The library’s Book Fund supported the Open Access publication for this book, allowing it to reach a wider audience.
Beyond Groningen, my thanks go to Martin Conboy both for his long-standing support of my own work, and for pushing me to think about how novel developments in journalism sit within longer trends of history, culture, and societal change. Much the same can be said about John Steel, who introduced me to key thinkers I continue to engage with and whose work has helped me structure my thinking about political theory and journalism’s connection to political projects. I also want to thank Henrik Bødker for his convivial friendship and his sharp questions about my work, and Bob Franklin for opening doors to an even wider world of digital journalism research with his trademark generosity and good nature. In recent years I have also benefited from working with Kristoffer Holt, Lena Frischlich, Stephen Cushion, and Tine Ustad Figenschou on alternative news media, with Patrick Ferrucci on the changing institution of journalism, and with Oscar Westlund, Kristy Hess, and Edson Tandoc, shaping and promoting research in Digital Journalism Studies. I would especially like to thank Matt Carlson for our conversations at conferences and over email on the nature of metajournalistic discourses, and to Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk for her engagement with the ideas and arguments in this book, and thank both of them for their endorsements of this effort.
At Peter Lang, I would like to acknowledge the efforts of Lizzie Howard, who took on the Frontiers in Journalism Studies book series and has been a strong advocate for journalism studies scholarship as we’ve worked to build this series. The ease with which she took on projects that were already underway, and the understanding with which she supports what I hope to do in this project have been incredible. My thanks go as well to Niall Kennedy, who first approached me to develop the Frontiers in Journalism Studies book series for Peter Lang.
Books are lonely processes, or at least the writing can be. But they are made far less lonely when you at the end of the day there is someone to pull you out of your spiral of ideas, and talk through them to better identify what needs attention. For me, that someone has been Sandra Banjac, whose probing questions in those conversations has helped me strengthen my arguments, and whose support has helped carry me through putting them together in the book in front of you now.
Acknowledged contributions
This book is the culmination of more than five years of thinking, trialing, erring, and developing ideas. If you attended a conference or research seminar where I have presented, you might have seen preliminary analysis, early findings, or half-baked ideas that have since developed into the arguments here. Initial research that appears in whole or in part in this book was presented at the Future of Journalism conferences in Cardiff (2021, 2023), at ECREA conferences in Utrecht (2022) and Aarhus (2022), at the Media and Emotional Mobilization conference in Kalmar Sweden (2023), and at the Dutch Research School for Media Studies (RMeS) conference in Amsterdam (2023).
Given that long trajectory, I want to acknowledge those who assisted with data gathering and analysis on related projects that have benefited this book.
- Nathalie Fridzema was a research assistant on an earlier study, Interrogating Antagonists, funded by a Faculty of Arts start-up Grant at the University of Groningen. She transcribed interviews with Paul Staines and Ashley Feinberg that are referred to here, and supported an interactive audience study on audiences of peripheral journalistic actors as part of that project.
- Ane Mestvedthagen was a research assistant on a separate project and helped construct the sample of PJ Media content analyzed in this book.
I would also like to acknowledge informal contributions:
- Kun He’s PhD research examining online populism in China, which I supervised with Prof. Marcel Broersma, broadened my thinking about populism.
- Klára Smejkal’s PhD research at Masaryk University on trust, populism, and public service media in the Czech Republic, on which I was a supervising consultant, offered opportunities to expand my thinking around cultural backlash and polarization.
- Preliminary discussions with Declan McDowell-Naylor for a separate project that never quite took off led to the inclusion of some aspects of discourse analysis utilized here.
- Working with João C. Magalhães, who approached me in May 2022 to develop a project on populist journalists in Brazil and the United States, benefited my thinking about intersections of populism and journalism.
While every effort has been made to fully acknowledge the work of peers whose work I draw on, ideas can flow quickly and furiously within the socialized spaces of our field. I hope I have not left unacknowledged any ideas that have emerged out of conversations at conferences in front of panels, over drinks at symposia, in the hallways of our institutions, via tweets, email exchanges, and all the other places where paths cross. If I have done so, please reach out.
Chapter 1
Our fractured worlds
We live in fractured societies, and it is hard not to notice.
At any given moment during the past several years, it would not be unusual to step outside and find the roads and city centers in the places where we live filled with groups of protesters waving banners and shouting slogans as they stall traffic and block pedestrians. Their reasons for doing so cut across politics, cultures, generations, and ideologies, and for that reason these disruptions have come to represent differences between people who hold polar opposite views of one another. They have come to represent the fractures in our societies.
This is certainly apparent in the Netherlands where I live and where over the past few years farmers have taken their tractors from farms in the North to the Hague in the South, bisecting the country as they drove down the highway to protest what they and their supporters see as an overreaching government trying to implement policies that demand farms curb nitrogen emissions and curtail agricultural pollution. Protesters have also dumped hay bales and manure along their routes and in front of the government buildings they assembled around, decrying what they see as a widening divide between rural communities and those in power, a fracture that has left farmers feeling overlooked and angry.1
From initially disrupting the flow of traffic on highways and in city and town centers, these protests grew into a populist political movement and gave voice to a new political party—the BoerBurgerBeweging, or BBB (Farmer-Citizen Movement)—that took the largest share of the upper house in the Dutch parliament in the Spring of 2023 and is now part of the right-wing coalition leading the Dutch government. Recently, in Germany, similar tactics were being used by farmers blocking border crossings and gathering in parking lots and public squares, behind signs that remind observers that without farmers there would be no bread, butter, or beer.2 There too farmers’ messages are being amplified by the extreme-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has seized on farmers’ discontent in an effort to amass political power.3 As I finish writing this book, these protests have spread further across Europe, as farmers seek populist support and as populist politicians back them.
At the same time and in the same countries, highways are also being blocked by climate activists who hold politically opposite positions. Linking arms and gluing themselves to roadways, these protesters have taken to the streets in an effort to shake up what they see as a complacent society paying too little attention to the warming planet, prodding governments they see as doing too little to be more ambitious. Extinction Rebellion and similar movements have been buoyed by progressive and left-wing politicians attending their rallies, including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat, who spoke to a September 2023 protest in language invoking unity: “We are all here for one reason: to end fossil fuels around the planet.”4
Details
- Pages
- XVI, 248
- Publication Year
- 2025
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781433198755
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781433198762
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433198748
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781433197581
- DOI
- 10.3726/b22400
- Open Access
- CC-BY
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2025 (January)
- Keywords
- Journalism Peripheral Journalistic Actors Alternative Media Agonism Journalistic Boundaries Metajournalistic Discourses Populism Political Polarization Fragmentation
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2025. XVI, 248 pp., 3 b/w ill., 8 b/w tables.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG