Contents

Title page
Copyright page
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. The Crisis of the Institutional Press
2. Enemies of the Institution
3. Defining the Institution
4. The Implicated Institution
5. The Emerging Hybrid Institution
6. The Sustainable Institution
7. Aspirations for the Institution
Epilogue
References
Index
End User License Agreement
The Crisis of the Institutional Press
Stephen D. Reese
polity
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Copyright © Stephen D. Reese 2021
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Preface
The challenges faced by journalism have been well established, as a
profession under assault and an industry struggling for economic
viability. Within that context, I set out in this book to rethink the
idea of the institution itself, arguing that a better conceptualization is
needed if we are to find a way forward and fully understand the
forces that threaten the institutional press in the post-truth era. The
coronavirus pandemic, spreading globally as I write this, is only the
most recent example highlighting the need for robust, trusted, freely
disseminated reporting, whether in authoritarian societies or more
liberal western democracies. China, for example, has systematically
weakened civil society institutions, including journalism and
nongovernmental organizations, that help provide accountability,
leaving it ill-prepared to respond effectively to such a massive health
crisis and undermining public trust in the government. But the
United States faces similar challenges, with a presidential
administration not known for truth-telling, at odds with scientific
agencies, and inclined to politicize any issue and undermine trust in
traditional institutions, including the press.
While attacks on journalism are not new, in recent years they have
been increasingly effective in degrading public confidence in the
institution, but at the same time they have helped clarify its
importance. Indeed, the value of a thing is never so clear as when
confronting its loss. Those complaints about the media have
hardened into an anti-institutional structure and been given new
virulence by the strength of global populism. Attitudes toward
journalism in some quarters have deteriorated from distrust to
skepticism and cynicism, and even on to nihilism, with its threatened
chaos representing the very opposite of institutionalism.
Defining the institution, however, is more difficult than its
familiarity would suggest. So, I take a step back to consider this
conceptualization, recognizing that institutions, just because they
have certain enduring attributes, do not automatically deserve to
endure in the same form. No doubt some creative destruction has
been warranted, but what deserves to remain? What if we cast a
broader net to capture what now constitutes the institution of
journalism? That’s the question I take up next to consider a more
dynamic picture of emerging structures that are still in the service of
journalistic values and therefore deserve support. I develop a concept
that I term the hybrid institution, arguing that the new media system
still contains an institutional core, which functions beyond the walls
of traditional news organizations. Finding this hybrid institution has
been clouded by the traditional approach of media economics,
predicated on the operation of media firms, many of which have
struggled for economic survival. But the institution, as I think of it
here, is not just the sum of a conglomeration of firms. The economic
story of market failure has, however, forced the question of what
about the institution is worth paying for, and what other kinds of
support are needed beyond profit-based commercial considerations.
Finally, overarching these questions are the grave threats to liberal
democracy, which make it imperative that those thinking about these
issues be more attentive to the question of normative values. The
field of communication, as with other social sciences, historically has
adopted a functionalist, ameliorative approach to the social system,
taking largely for granted the institutions within which it operates,
and defining its problems according to the status quo. And that
detached, objective approach to research has been at odds with
tackling larger normative concerns, which risks sounding
unempirical, polemical or “unscientific.” A different path is needed.
In thinking through this challenge, I find myself returning to a
warning I encountered early in my career from Robert Lynd, in his
Knowledge for What?, a critique published in 1939 of the prevailing
social sciences of the day. He argued that “the social scientist’s
equation must include not only the given set of structured
institutions, but also what the present human carriers of those
institutions are groping to become” (1939: 180, his italics). What
kind of society do we aspire to, and what institutional forms would it
require? Lynd was writing on the eve of World War II, and our
current moment seems no less fraught. It is the urgency of these
questions, particularly concerning the press, that has motivated me
to describe this moment as a crisis and attempt to understand it as
best I can.
This volume is in many respects the culmination of several strands of
thought over the course of a career. I began pulling some of those
thoughts together in the fall of 2017, while a visiting fellow at the
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University,
which yielded a conference paper that prompted encouraging
responses from colleagues, including Andrew Chadwick whose work
I had begun citing. Then, when asked at the same conference by
Mary Savigar at Polity to contribute to a series devoted to key
concepts in media, I proposed the work I had been mulling on the
“institution,” an idea later expanded instead, with her support, to
become this longer volume. Indeed, the concept did prove to be more
complex and conflicted than I had yet done justice to. The idea of the
institution often seems wrapped in nostalgia, and with something of
a reactionary flavor, given the indicators and calls for the de-
institutionalization of news. But the institutional press can now, in
view of recent trends, be seen in a more progressive light and its vital
role better appreciated, given the authoritarian threat to democratic
life around the world – a threat many of us never thought we would
see to this degree, and that we are still trying to make sense of. The
last few years have shown the attraction of authoritarianism and its
infallible strong-man, who appeals to power, nationalism, and fear,
who seeks domination over enemies and uses emotional appeals to
unleash popular passions, centered not on specific policies and
evidence but on attitude and tribalism. This is a very different
context to that of the rational citizen model in the political science I
first learned, wherein the media provided information, leading to
political interest and discussion, from which, of course, followed
engagement and participation in a virtuous cycle. That sequence still
guides many research studies but seems to describe a different world
than the one we’re now living in. That disconnect has driven my
thinking as reflected in this volume.
Several years ago, I set out to give classic studies in media sociology
some biographical context and found myself intrigued with learning
more about the story behind the story. Although it never became its
own book, many of the interviews I conducted found their way into
another volume (Shoemaker and Reese 2014) and other publications
(e.g., Reese and Ballinger 2001). The longer I’ve been in the field and
the more people I’ve known, the more biographical details I can
provide. Reflecting on my own intellectual autobiography may
impose more coherence on my thinking looking backward than it
deserves, given how it unfolded lived forward. Nevertheless, it’s
rewarding to recollect the circumstances connected to whatever
questions have interested me over the years – some opportunistic,
some more carefully planned. This book is not a memoir but it does
trace the themes that have characterized my own research career,
which thankfully has been long enough to allow me to experience a
lot of disciplinary shifts and “turns.” Throughout the book I’ve
engaged in liberal (and shameless) self-citation in order to mark how
these themes have manifested themselves in specific publications.
It’s interesting for me to see how these themes have kept re-
emerging over the years in different forms. So, I will take this further
opportunity to briefly wax nostalgic in a more personal narrative.
My college graduation year of 1976 was, in retrospect, the high-water
mark of public trust in American journalism, still flush with success
over its impact during the Watergate period, and confident in having
reached what was later seen to be its “high modernism” stage (Hallin
1992). In my graduate school days, not much later at the University
of Wisconsin, I was socialized into the normal social science of the
time in the field of mass communication, an approach characterized
by experimental and survey-based methods for the empirical study
of, primarily social-psychological, responses to media messages. I
was intrigued to read and compare notes some years later with John
Durham Peters, who has vividly described his own experience with
that style of research in the early 1980s at a competing, but
philosophically similar, center of communication study at Stanford
(which shared with Wisconsin a core faculty member, Steve Chaffee,
who alternated back and forth for a time) (see Peters 2008). In both
programs, the institution of journalism was considered important,
but resided in the background as an implicit value – not a central
research concern.
Regarding the competing research styles vying for influence at the
time, the cultural studies wing that we associated with James Carey
at Illinois seemed unscientific, and it was hard to know what to do
with the more macro-oriented, critical theory rooted in Europe,
which, if not unscientific, certainly seemed tendentious and gloomy,
compared to the largely taken for granted institutional context and
optimistic tone of communication science at the high-water mark of
American journalism. The various “Ferments in the Field”
introspections conducted by key thinkers in the 1980s, and
published in the field’s leading Journal of Communication early in
my career, began to change that. In the meantime, my own interests
in behind the scenes power, dormant during my graduate school
phase, were awakened by my own junior-faculty self-improvement
reading plan, which included discovering the great American
sociologist C. Wright Mills (whose ideas about mass society had been
only briefly mentioned in my graduate seminar with Jack McLeod on
social system theory). I admired Mills for his boldness and the sweep
of his intellectual ambition, and recognized his critique of the
dominant paradigm, so familiar to me via the communication field.
As time went by, I shifted perspective toward a more critical media
sociology, and fortunately for me these interests coincided with a
burst of energy in the field around journalism studies, with new
divisions, journals, programs, and fresh ideas from emerging
scholars. Many of them have had a strong influence on my thinking,
and helped me stay current and rethink some of my ideas about
media sociology. Some I’ve been fortunate to have as students, some
as regular conference colleagues, and I’ve tried to give credit
wherever possible. Given my involvement in a school of journalism
(now “& media”) at Texas, that realignment of the field toward
journalism also brought me closer to the concerns shared with
colleagues in the professional world.
Since then, the changing media eco-system has challenged me and
the field to adapt. In the 1980s, media studies meant studying big
media, with television especially commanding the limelight. My early
interest in the concept of media reliance, and the deleterious
“videomalaise” effects of television news, was rooted in social survey
questions to respondents as to whether they relied primarily on
newspapers, television, or both for their news (Reese and Miller
1981; Miller and Reese 1982). My later content analysis of television
news was made easier by the arrival of the Vanderbilt Television
News Archives, with the view of a unitary news media symbolized by
the tall stack of multi-volume abstracts I discovered in a colleague’s
office. The institutional nature of journalism was a given, with its
value and permanence assumed. There may have been gaps in
coverage and other faults with that larger media, such as George
Gerbner’s widely cited findings about the distorted and “scary world”
of television entertainment, but surely, it seemed, those problems
could be addressed if pointed out by researchers. Online media
archives later helped launch a boom in the study of content, which I
participated in (Reese 1990a; Swisher and Reese 1992), making
possible broad geographic comparisons and the study of what would
later be termed “meta-journalistic discourse.”
Media criticism, of course, was nothing new in politics. President
Nixon’s vice-president Spiro Agnew had taken an aggressive position
toward the media, famously calling them “nattering nabobs of
negativism,” but that didn’t get much traction among academics like
myself, and, after all, there was the Watergate scandal’s seeming
triumph of the press over its critics. But then sharper scholarly
critiques began to gain greater prominence, particularly from the left
with the publication of Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing
Consent (1988). This attack, originating as it did from outside the
communication field, was not widely embraced, and was dismissed
as unscientific and too political by mainstream academics.
Meanwhile, more concerted accusations of media bias were emerging
from conservative critics, beginning with the publication of The
Media Elite in 1986, an attack by right-leaning academics that
launched a program of research connecting conservative beliefs
about the media with what was considered evidence of its hopeless
bias (Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter 1986). A more programmatic
attack has become institutionalized, and the liberal-bias claim made
an integral part of Republican politics. Still, it was an easy program
of attack to dismiss within the field, and the few researchers who did
adopt a conservative perspective were not taken that seriously. But
that has changed, with the growth of the media-bias industry into a
full-fledged counter-institutional force.
As a professor, I find myself at the intersection of two institutions
under attack: higher education and journalism, and yet students
keep coming, and the field keeps growing. In fact, the subject of
journalism seems to have become newly relevant and more
intriguing than ever for people I connect with outside the academy.
When I tell them I’m a faculty member in a journalism school, it
seems to me that they respond with much greater curiosity than in
years past, and with a certain deeper kind of interest, suggesting that
the plight of journalism they’ve heard about signifies that something
important is at stake, something worth taking seriously, including in
the academy from people like myself. So, I’m encouraged by that,
even as I’m disappointed with some of the trends in the country and
the newly unmasked attitudes of those I thought I knew better. The
institution now has long passed its high modernism phase and it’s
unclear what version of it will survive. In any case, it can no longer
be taken for granted, and its health should be a concern of top
priority for academic observers. So, when thinking about what to
write about next, I seemed to be drawn inexorably toward saying
something, even if difficult to fully formulate, about the threats as we
now observe them. The time is late, and even without having the
kind of deeply researched evidence one might hope for in a book-
length statement, I wanted at least to lay out my thoughts – and an
agenda for myself that fits these concerns. And, since it’s not
emotionally sustainable to be so pessimistic, I find myself asking
more optimistically framed normative questions about what
developments look hopeful for the future, even outside the narrowly
defined boundaries of professional journalism.
Finally, as an educator, I have found myself challenged to find ways
to introduce this material to students, many of whom now arrive as
undergraduates fully programmed with assumptions about how the
media work, and in which direction the bias runs, immersed in mis-
and disinformation from communities that have become far more
tribalized (even, I suspect, within the last three years). And they have
legitimate reasons to distrust traditional institutions, as they
contemplate a more precarious economic future than I did at their
age. I want to respect that, and approach these issues in a way that
doesn’t activate their filters, trigger confirmation bias, and short-
circuit critical thinking – including my own. In recent news literacy
teaching I have opted to take what I tell them is an institutionalist
civic-values approach, arguing that beyond a tiresome debate about
the partisan leanings of one journalist over another, we have to
recognize the importance of institutions and take seriously what
threatens to undermine them, and especially the institutional press. I
hope this book will help scholars like myself take those threats
seriously too. We have to find the right balance between being
hopelessly negative about journalistic shortcomings and becoming
naive apologists for some version of the profession that no longer
exists. That is, we have to speak both as critic and champion to
students who have barely known a media eco-system other than the
present one, and who badly need healthy social institutions, not just
like the ones I grew up with but the ones we hope will emerge in the
future. It’s going to take some work to make sense of these
interesting times, including from those of us like me who have been
at it awhile, and I appreciate the opportunity to do that work in this
project.
Acknowledgments
I’ve been around this business long enough to accumulate a lot of
personal and intellectual debts to friends and colleagues, too
numerous to risk enumerating – but I’ll try. (And yes, I take
responsibility for my own mistakes.)
I am grateful for my own institutional home, the University of Texas,
my only one as a full-time professor. I’m thankful for my many
colleagues there over the years, especially in the early going: Pam
Shoemaker, Wayne Danielson, Max McCombs, and Dwight Teeter,
the department chair who first hired me. Later I was chair and
director myself, so especially appreciate the friendship and support
in turn of my successors: Lorraine Branham, Tracy Dahlby, Glenn
Frankel, R. B. Brenner, and Kathleen McElroy. I’ll add my long-time
friend and colleague Rosental Alves to the list of confidants and
supporters. In a job where I get to be a professional learner, I’m
grateful for the many wonderful graduate students at Texas who have
helped keep me up to date and challenged, some of them cited in this
book.
But that’s not the only place where I’ve received institutional
nourishment. Looking back, I’m particularly glad I decided to go to
the University of Wisconsin for graduate school. It felt right the
moment I set foot on campus, a place with a unique spirit that made
a lot of things possible, particularly with the support and friendship
of my adviser, Dan Drew. Madison was for me a winning
combination of smart, productive people who didn’t take themselves
too seriously, producing some great times and lasting friendships.
When it finally got warm, we’d gather at the Union terrace for a
beer(s) on the shore of beautiful Lake Mendota, still one of my
fondest memories. Taking one of the nearby boats for a sail caused
the shore, campus, and any related worries to slowly recede into the
distance.
I appreciate the many colleagues at universities around the world
who have helped broaden my horizons and so graciously hosted me
at one time or another, with me often wishing it could have been
longer. I’ve been fortunate to have many long stays at the Salzburg
Global Seminar, where a family of colleagues has grown around
Salzburg’s summer media literacy academy. I’m honored to
contribute to and grow from my time in this magical place with these
special people.
But getting back to Texas, after stepping down in 2017 from the
dean’s office, where I was privileged to work with my long-time
friend and colleague Rod Hart, his successor Jay Bernhardt helped
with a semester’s teaching release. In mulling over how and where to
spend this precious time, I reached out to Rasmus Nielsen at Oxford
University’s Reuters Institute, who fortuitously was able to extend a
senior fellow appointment, allowing me to incubate some ideas in
that rarefied environment, where one can’t help feeling a little
smarter. Thanks to Mary Savigar at Polity nearby, who pushed me to
develop a longer statement of my ideas about the institution than the
shorter one I originally proposed. I wasn’t so sure I could finish the
job on deadline when I got back to new course preparation and full-
time teaching, but she said she thought I could, and so, she said, did
the reviewers (thank you, anonymous reviewers). So, I did.
Finally, I am grateful for my family of encouragers, most of all my
wife Carol, a wonderful teacher, who, in addition to being a devoted
partner, has always been excited about ideas – a gift that I received
from her starting in graduate school (another happy result of going
to Wisconsin), when she thought I had a few worth sharing. That
helped me believe I did too. I come from a family of educators, and
my mom and dad, a professor himself, always made sure I had
opportunities to grow in the life of the mind. I think of them often,
especially during academic milestones like this one, and hope I’ve
honored that path, including in how I’ve encouraged my own sons,
Daniel and Aaron, and his sons, James and Danny.
During this season of life, with the challenge of staying intellectually
fresh and innovative after all these years, I put my faith in the
psalmist’s promise that “They still bear fruit in old age, they will stay
fresh and green.” So, then along came the latest member of the clan
(thanks to Aaron and Kate), with an early 2020 copyright date:
granddaughter Elisabeth Joy, who brings new life and hope. In a
spirit of gratitude, I dedicate this book to the “unseen cloud of
witnesses,” my family: past, present, and yet to come.
1
The Crisis of the Institutional Press
As attacks on the press have become more strident and its survival
seemingly more precarious, its importance has become more clear.
Indeed, such an institutionally organized forum is needed more than
ever to resist the dark side of the internet and provide a centripetal
force against the scattered and increasingly polarized factions in
society, pulling apart from economic dislocation, tribalism, and fear.
Beyond concerns about journalism, media, and news in general, I
refer specifically here to the “press,” and the institution that name
signifies, or perhaps more redundantly, the “institutional press” of
the title. Institutions provide a historically rooted and deeply
embedded framework of practices and relationships through which
social life is conducted. What happens when that framework is
degraded and no longer available to mediate social action? The
sports world provides an analogy. Referees enforce a common set of
game rules, make judgments, and deliver the news to a player
committing an infraction. Threats of violence against these
messengers (which journalists essentially are) or a team’s
unwillingness to accept the outcome resulting from their judgments
make it impossible to have a game at all. The competition becomes a
free-for-all with the most ruthless and strongest contender emerging
as the seeming winner, but the game is undermined and the victory
illegitimate. Indeed, one of the more chilling comments from Donald
Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign came in response to a
question about whether he would respect the results of the election:
“I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential
election,” he said, before pausing and adding, to the delight of his
audience, “If I win” (Lewis, Jacobs, and Siddiqui 2016). Even as
president he continues to regard any outcome unfavorable to him not
as a result of voter preferences, policy consequences, or economic
conditions, but as the fault of a corrupt “deep state” or antagonistic
news media. We don’t seem to be playing the same institutional
game any more. Is it a boxing match, with Marquis of Queensbury
rules, or a street fight? And what are the consequences of
abandoning all constraints in a race to the bottom? This concern
goes beyond any one political or national movement. Patterns of
violence around the US now suggest a climate attributable not to one
specific movement or organization, such as the far-right promoting
anti-Semitic attacks. The phenomenon has become broader, based
on anxiety, fear, and grievance settling, with a New York Hate
Crimes Task Force officer lamenting that “It’s every identity
targeting every identity” (Bellafante 2018).
The importance of the press to democratic society may have seemed
self-evident in years past, but that quaint period has long since
passed. The transformation of the media eco-system has weakened
professional boundaries, destabilized the news industry and led to
what would appear to be a de-institutionalization of journalism.
According to the Pew Research Center, newsroom employment has
declined by 25 percent since 2008, a figure that includes print,
broadcast, cable, and digital-native publishers. The drop was
significantly severe for daily newspapers, where the number of
newsroom employees decreased by almost 50 percent from 2008 to
2018 – from 71,000 to 38,000.1
This vastly more diverse news eco-system exhibits growing internal
tensions and contradictory signals that are difficult to sort out. For
example, the popular success of the movie Spotlight, depicting the
Boston Globe’s lengthy investigation of abuse within the Catholic
church, and the post-2016 US election uptick in subscriptions to the
New York Times and Washington Post suggest there is still an
appetite for solid work by professional journalists, but a reporter
from that same Washington Post recently said, “We’re losing a large
part of the country,” which has given up on mainstream media, “and
I don’t think they’re coming back” (Hayes 2017). Not only are they
not coming back, they have instead embraced their own parallel
universe media that don’t follow the same institutional norms of the
traditional press, media that cater to suspicion and fear at the
expense of evidence-based reporting. The power of that emotional
grievance has been dramatically demonstrated in just the last few
years. Calls for exclusion based on appeals to nationalist identity
pack a much more powerful punch than calls for pluralism and
democracy, especially when backed up by partisan media and their
imperative of outrage. Identity politics distort social values into a
form of fundamentalism, to the point where a group, race, ethnicity,
or religion becomes itself the value. Indeed, the politics of exclusion
has no real moral values other than assertion of power and the right
to a privileged position.
The press does face a crisis, and the multiple layers of threat make
that a justifiable claim, but what exactly constitutes the institution
that is the subject of this crisis? For what failings is it appropriately
to blame, and what aspects are worth defending? In some respects
there has never been such an information abundance; news comes at
us conveniently and in great volume, through traditional and newer
channels. Alternative, niche, and partisan media have grown, with
web traffic on some such sites rivaling legacy news organizations.
Conservative Fox News is the most highly rated cable news channel,
and online right-wing outlets, including the alt-right’s Breitbart, are
among the most frequently visited news sites. Giant social media
platforms push news 24-7 to anyone with a smartphone. Meanwhile,
news is not just published by news organizations. Nongovernmental
organizations, for example, are producing stories about human
rights, the environment, and a multitude of other issues, while
citizen journalism continues to proliferate. So, has the institution
been rendered out of date by this information economy of
abundance? A closer look shows that is not the case. The information
that seems so abundant is often of low quality, and the so-called
“iron core,” accountability function of journalism has been eroded,
especially in those areas where commitments to serious local
newsgathering have been abandoned. Even if news and information
as a broader commodity is more abundant, then, a strong and robust
institution dedicated to responsible newsgathering still plays a
crucial role. Thus, in the wake of global concern over the health of
democratic institutions, and particularly the institutional press, this
is a good time to think more clearly about how an institutionalized
journalism matters – as a system and accepted framework of
providing reliable evidence for decision-making, a counter-weight
against political power, a check on authoritarian over-reach, and a
way to ensure transparency in public life.
The challenge in answering those questions, though, is to identify the
scope of the institution that is evolving, how it’s evolving, and what
makes journalism institutional in ways that are not obvious and as
easily observed as they once were. In this book I want to think
through this idea of the institution, a term that has been applied so
loosely and in so many different contexts that it has lost some of its
analytical value. Yes, institutions are important, as we may agree, but
what are the essential aspects and character of, especially, the
journalistic institution, and what are the threats that confront it?
Here I would note that if the traditional model of communication
research has marked the progression of media messages from
senders to receivers, from producers to audiences, my focus is clearly
on the production side. That distinction, however, has become much
less defensible as the cycle of information anticipates and
incorporates audiences into the production of news, as “prosumers.”
If my emphasis lies with the institutionalized forces of media content
and control, the audience certainly plays an often implicit but
important role, not only as participants in the news cycle but as
citizens who tolerate or reject the values of the institution and its
performance (Reese 2016a; Reese and Shoemaker 2016).
We do need to take this crisis seriously, because it’s not an
exaggeration to argue that the fate of democratic governance is at
stake. That’s not to say that journalism has been without fault in
contributing to a decline in institutional trust, meaning we have to
understand those failings and better stipulate which aspects of the
institution should be allowed to wither and which should be
preserved, and on what basis we choose between them. In recent
years, the political threat backed by the surge of populist energy has
raised the visibility of journalism, for good and ill; some have been
led to better appreciate the importance of the press, while others
have had their distrust of the news confirmed even more strongly.
Attitudes toward the press obviously track the broader polarization
in society, so we need to know how to make better sense of those
divisions. That’s why strong institutions are necessary to manage
these fractures and channel this energy in healthier directions,
supporting values of justice and inclusion. They need to be more
responsive to legitimate grievances. So, we need to ask, what
institutional structures will best help promote these democratic
values?
As we think about the crisis of the institutional press at the
professional and political levels, the economic challenge cannot be
avoided. How will a robust institution be supported with the
resources needed to resist attack, both legal and rhetorical, and carry
out an expensive and labor-intensive task, to provide the
accountability function provided at the institutional core? Without
those resources – whether commercial, philanthropic, or public-state
support – the institution will be increasingly susceptible to political
and private capture, and its mission co-opted by forces with a
different moral calculus. That’s why, as we think more clearly about
the emerging institution in an online eco-system, we need to be more
explicit about how press performance is defined, and about our
normative expectations for journalism in whatever new forms it
develops. In the desperation to find an economic lifeline for
journalism, these kinds of discussion have not been made a priority.
The business of news still needs to be understood within an
institutional context.
The idea of crisis, as often interpreted from its Chinese character, is
said to combine the idea of danger with opportunity. And that’s an
important duality to keep in mind, with an optimistic aspect. The
institutional press is certainly in danger, but as I consider the many
threats at hand I also want to take a forward-looking view in
identifying the possibilities for reform and evolution as the press
changes in response to the current threats, in ways I hope will allow
it to better serve its function. This chapter lays out the framework of
the book, which I briefly review below, with the objective to better
understand the institution of journalism, the crisis it confronts, and
its value for a democratic society.

The populist threat: a counter-institution

The press is under attack from many sides, and particularly on the
political front. These attacks have been perhaps the most visible,
with an extreme version casting the press as the “enemy of the
people.” Journalism has always played an important role as an
antagonist to those in authority, leading Michael Schudson (2010) to
have to explain why democracy needs an “unlovable press.” But this
historical moment seems particularly worrisome, with a weakened
and less self-assured traditional news media confronting a more
energized and sustained attack on an international scale. As an
extreme case, the Philippines has been called ground-zero of
misinformation: since taking office in 2016, President Duterte has
threatened to block the renewal of a license for the country’s largest
broadcast network, called reporters who ask him tough questions
“spies,” and warned them that “just because you’re a journalist you
are not exempted from assassination.”2 This brand of political
populism has driven a counter-institutional antagonism toward the
so-called mainstream media, which has weakened public trust in the
traditional value of journalism and undermined its epistemological
authority. According to a 2018 Ipsos poll, 85 percent of Americans
agreed that “Freedom of the press is essential for American
democracy,” but the political split is stark. While 29 percent overall
agreed that “the news media is the enemy of the American people,”
48 percent of Republicans supported that view. While 26 percent
agreed that “the president should have the authority to close news
outlets engaged in bad behavior,” 43 percent of Republicans agreed
(Ipsos 2018).
In Silvio Waisbord’s (2018) analysis, populism rejects a
communication commons and the possibility of truth as a common
good, with popular “truths” always tied to partisan interests and
pitted against elite “lies.” Therefore, populism rejects the need for
truth-seeking institutions (and their experts) and prefers a self-
serving truth, an affirming truth that strengthens the tribe and
diminishes the “other.” Perceptions of reality may be shaped by
partisan interests, but truth is not reducible to those interests.
Authoritarian assertion stands in for institutional arbitration, but we
need some agreed-upon means of reliably preventing tribal realities
from shrinking in on themselves and of ensuring they have some
connection to a consensual set of facts. The value of institutions lies
in providing accepted means to seek those reliable truths. Whatever
their weaknesses, their procedures can be known and steps taken for
self-correction and accountability. Trump didn’t invent populism,
but his style of political attack and divisive rhetoric fits the populist
tradition of Us vs. Them, with the press being positioned clearly as
“them.” He is one of several global leaders taking the populist path to
power – from the UK to Brazil to India – and his success has
emboldened those around the world to take the extreme measures
they may have only secretly contemplated in the past. Even if the US
has a strong tradition of press freedom and institutional safeguards,
other countries are not so fortunate, and the damage to them will be
even greater.
Institutions, in general, have become a more timely concern for
disciplinary debates within the university, especially in view of these
anti-democratic trends. But there are still different levels of alarm,
with political scientists, for example, lacking consensus over the
populist threat. While recognizing disturbing trends in Europe and
Latin America, some conclude that US institutions are relatively
robust, and that Trump’s attacks on the press are fairly benign. His
political success, in this view, is regarded as an historical aberration,
which will be rectified in due course by the natural workings of the
political system. I would take a more alarmist view, concerned that,
as with climate change, once an erosion of social structures is
allowed to occur the trend may prove irreversible. This is no time to
experiment with vital social institutions, even with their observable
flaws, without a clear way forward to something better. In his recent
research on alt-right extremists, New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz
observed their basic nihilism, finding that these reactionaries with
online media tools were in it to tear down, not build up: “As for what
kind of society might emerge from the ashes, they had no coherent
vision, and showed little interest in developing one” (2019: 23). With
all the faults of political journalism, he concludes that he is a
“reluctant institutionalist,” because “What if it was replaced by
something incomparably worse?” (205).
According to recent surveys by the political scientists who are
beginning to take this phenomenon seriously, this nihilism is not
confined to a few online alt-right trolls, but is rather based on a
“need for chaos” which drives a significant part of the electorate in
both the US and Europe bent on opposing elites and politicians in
general. Respondents favorably endorse statements such as, “When I
think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help
thinking ‘just let them all burn,’” or “We cannot fix the problems in
our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over,”
with which a surprising 40 percent agreed. Even if in the minority,
these chaos voters can drive outsize influence by sharing through
social media what the researchers call “hostile political rumors”
(Petersen, Osmundsen, and Arceneaux 2019). I recognize that one
must be careful in drawing exaggerated comparisons, especially in
likening political leaders to fascist dictators of the mid-twentieth
century. Invoking Hitler and Mussolini can short-circuit more
reasoned analysis over the historical parallels, and yet we surely
must be mindful of the possibilities. I would never have imagined
that American politics would have reached the levels (or depths) it
has, and yet as it becomes more customary we risk, even in academic
research, normalizing these conditions, becoming acclimated to
them, and failing to raise concerns where warranted for fear of being
regarded as alarmist (or “unscientific”).
Furthermore, it no longer works to think of the press as a single
entity. Concerns over the institutional press need to be carefully
drawn, because populist voices have developed their own media as
extensions of sectors of the political institution. Certain news
organizations may have some of the journalistic trappings and
appear to transmit information resembling news, but they don’t
commit to the same normative values, and may even seek to
delegitimate the media institution itself – as is the case with many
right-wing media outlets. Entire networks of television programs,
radio shows, podcasts, and newsletters have grown up around
political ideologies to form a counter-institution, drawing its energy
and motivating mission from its opposition to the traditional
mainstream press. Since the early days of the blogosphere the
mainstream media have been an integral and complementary part of
online citizen networks, which derived authority from linking to
professional news sites and redeploying their information (Reese et
al., 2007). In many ways that has been a positive development. For
example, in Callison’s (2014) anthropological study of different
communities involved in climate change, she observes how the
development of blogs and other means of reacting to science
journalism from policy experts, activists, and the public has had the
effect of holding journalists accountable and bringing norms of
reporting into sharper relief. This constructive role of these
alternative voices has been little acknowledged in the media-bias
debate, and swamped since Callison’s research by the social media
misinformation vortex. That reliance of citizen networks on
mainstream media still exists, but the relationship has grown more
adversarial, with the online counter-sphere growing much more
organized and systematic in its attacks. Hyper-partisan sites link to
mainstream sources so as to oppose them, threatening to turn the
relationship into a parasitic one that threatens, in a sense, the host.
We need to take this new multi-polar media landscape into account
when defining institutional boundaries and making claims about
what journalism should be about.

Conceptions of the institution

Although greater concern is now being raised about the importance
of institutions, social theorizing in the early part of this century has
drifted away from taking them seriously, at least as defining an
object of study. In the case of the press, there is in fact a de-
institutionalization of journalism, where boundaries have grown
much more fluid, making it a less useful analytical category.
Grappling with the crisis of journalism, however, obviously requires
some attention to the nature of the institution, however it’s defined,
and to the most helpful theoretical perspectives for understanding its
emergent form. As mentioned above, “institution” is one of those
terms that are so widely used that they appear to be self-evident, but
resist more explicit definition. The many disciplinary perspectives
that invoke the concept also muddy the waters and need to be sorted
out for the purposes of this discussion.
The forces of globalization have captured much of the attention away
from traditional institutions and challenged social science to
conceptualize new networks of power. The work of Castells (1996) on
the Network Society has inspired much of this thinking, which places
the very idea of institutions in tension with the forces of globalization
and the communication networks that support it. The idea of the Net
does point to an important new dimension, where flows of capital
and coordination of decision-making take place across a networked
space – disrupting the traditional power of nation-states and their
associated institutions. In his more recent work, Rupture: The Crisis
of Liberal Democracy (2019), Castells refers to institutions
frequently, but only to argue that they have lost their legitimacy, and
that new more responsive and stable ones have yet to emerge.
Certainly, at the individual level, people are no longer as reliant on
traditional institutions for providing their means of identity. They
are free to choose from a variety of sources in constructing what
Castells dubs the Self – actively, selectively, and intentionally. This
shifts agency to the individual in making sense out of life and one’s
place in the world. But that doesn’t mean the landscape of these
unique Selves is sociologically flat – unstructured into meaningful
and institutionally guided groupings. The Self may be individually
constructed, but with the help of powerful interests, cultural
resources, and media platforms. In the case of populist appeals, for
example, these identities are inflamed by the politics of outrage and
exploited for political advantage. They may be more cut off from the
guidance of traditional institutions, but populist rhetoric is still
structured around resistance to them. Particular suspicion, for
example, is reserved among the alt-right for international
institutions such as the United Nations. In other words, this
networked identity is not free-floating but continues to be rooted in,
if in opposition to, observable formations, and it continues to be
shaped by and react to institutional influence.
Has the Net taken the place of traditional institutions as an
organizing principle? In a sense yes, but the historical moment
reminds us not to lose sight of the value of those institutions – even
as they have suffered a crisis of legitimacy – and how they are
adapting to new global forces. Even with grave concerns over the
future of the institutional press, academic observers of journalism
have not always been willing or consistent in sounding the alarm. In
my view, cultural optimists express an overly confident expectation
that the cultural commitments to journalism will ensure institutional
survival. For example, Jeffrey Alexander (2016) and his “strong
culture program” colleagues regard journalism as an autonomous
and deep cultural force that will endure regardless of institutional
change, while media scholars like Michael Schudson (2014) have
even argued that accountability structures – which include the press
– are better than ever. But those accountability structures,
pejoratively known as the “deep state,” seem less robust than we
thought, with the hollowing out of the regulatory agencies and
pressure on government data-gathering to not publish or speak to
findings that are inconsistent with administration priorities. The
stripping away of layers of administrative staffing, expertise, and
record-keeping in key federal agencies of energy, agriculture, and
commerce are among the accountability concerns recently
documented by Michael Lewis (2018). This degradation works
against a common factual evidence-base for public policy and a
major source of journalistic raw materials.
Within the social sciences an institutionalist perspective has
provided an important way of posing questions about journalism.
What causes rules and assumptions to become deeply embedded in
social life – to become institutionalized? This approach to the press
carries an implicit empirical question: When does journalism
become an institution? Answer: When it no longer refers to a specific
company but to all those entities playing by the same rules, and to
the extent that other institutions respond to it as a single entity (e.g.,
“the media”). In that respect, the question once seemed to have a
clear answer – now, much less so. This unitary conception of the
press doesn’t conform to the current fragmented landscape of
institutions and counter-institutions, so to what extent is this
perspective still useful under these circumstances? We may be able
to observe how practices become institutionalized, but it is more
difficult to theorize their de-institutionalization. These are issues I’ll
take up in greater detail later.
If academic observers are not agreed on how to assess the current
condition of the institution, the public is just as unclear. The value of
the press in a democratic society has been predicated on its
contribution to community engagement and holding power to
account, but that accountability ethos was built around the model of
the embattled daily newspaper. The reality no longer conforms to the
idealized role once served by the city-based, daily news organization.
The values of journalism have been rooted in the guiding image of
that kind of news organization, even as the public may identify the
“news media” with the partisan pundits on cable television. It’s no
wonder the public is uncertain about institutional boundaries when
discussions of media coverage embrace such a wide variety of outlets.
For example, in a review of how “news” is changing in grappling with
the issue of climate change, the New York Times picked a couple of
non-news figures to illustrate the extremes of media “coverage.” The
writer cited a program on Fox News that featured a clip from John
Oliver’s HBO show with an award-winning science popularizer Bill
Nye, whose climate change alarmism is rebuked by the program’s
guest “personality,” Jesse Watters of Fox News (Tracy 2019).
Lumping these diverse figures together, from serious science-based
Nye and comedic-serious Oliver, to partisan pundit Watters, shows
the range of what passes in the public discourse as “news” or
“media,” and in this case does not include anything approximating a
daily newspaper.
So where does the institution now lie? That continues to be the focal
point of my concern in this book, but it undoubtedly now extends
beyond the traditional news industry or so-called legacy press. The
eco-system concept has been useful in better describing these shifts,
suggesting a way to think about both flows of news within a specific
geographical community and around non-place-based issues.
Anderson, for example, defines news eco-systems as “the entire
ensemble of individuals, organizations, and technologies, within a
particular geographic community or around a particular issue,
engaged in journalistic projection and, indeed, in journalistic
consumption” (2016: 4). An eco-system view puts more emphasis on
the material impact of one part of the eco-system on another,
describing how information flows, not automatically and without
friction, but with the help of the participants within it. But that
perspective, although more inclusive and fine-grained, does not
explain the role of the institution and when it matters. In allowing a
continuing role for the power of traditional institutions in his hybrid
system, Andrew Chadwick (2013) considers the interactions between
new and older media, including the BBC and the Washington Post,
as he includes the possibilities of dysfunctional hybridity, such as
“fake news,” bots, and hacking. We need to understand how to
conceptualize the institution in this new eco-system, the values that
attach to it, where it extends and to what it applies – and how that
helps us better understand the current crisis.

Media criticism and the implicated press

Although the institutional press is vital to the democratic function,
that doesn’t mean it gets a clean bill of health in its current
incarnation. Against this backdrop of political attack and eroding
public trust, we have to recognize that some of the institutional
wounds have been self-inflicted. Just as the public has had good
reason to reject the status quo when suffering the consequences of a
global capitalist system that has not worked in its interest (turning to
simplistic slogans like “Make America Great Again”), the media
system, and especially its largely commercial components, is
implicated in sowing the seeds of distrust. The press has failed to
provide a broad range of viewpoints, avoid stereotypical narratives,
and challenge government and insider-elite political frames. These
are all concerns well documented by those media scholars taking a
reformist view – implying that adjustments could be made to rectify
these gaps in coverage, stereotypes, and misrepresentations. Some of
these ideas have been taken to heart by the profession, and others
not. Too much emphasis, for example, is still placed on the election
horse-race framing of coverage and the strategic inside-game of
politics. And this comes at a cost to institutional trust, for both press
and elites, as indicated by a recent meta-analysis of thirty-two
studies on the effects of framing politics as a strategic battle (Zoizner
2018). Horse-race and gamesmanship coverage, according to the
research, adds to public cynicism and especially alienates young
voters from the process. A long line of scholars have taken a more
critical and structural perspective, emphasizing elite co-optation of
media, which renders them an ideological instrument for reinforcing
the status quo. As long as media are part of a capitalist system and
controlled by powerful financial interests, they are not exactly, in this
hegemonic view, autonomous or able to speak much truth to power.
This “media elite” idea has ironically been picked up by conservative
critics (themselves not exactly working class, and hardly Marxian),
and woven into their attacks (something I’ll return to later in this
volume).
These scholarly critiques, however, came with the implicit
expectation that some form of recognizable institution would always
be with us. Big media provided a big target and could be endlessly
critiqued across different theoretical and ideological perspectives,
without much concern for ultimate institutional survival. One could
even argue that the right particularly needs the institutional media to
survive, as a foil and bogeyman to oppose. The long tradition of
media criticism has raised important issues, whether they were acted
upon or not in professional reform, but a different kind of critique is
needed. We can be for the institution in spite of its failings.
Supporting the institutional press, as I argue we must, does not
mean swinging to the opposite extreme, with an unapologetic
defense of the mainstream media. It means being honest about the
institutional shortcomings and what will be needed to address them.
There is no shortage of reform proposals from within the profession
and from industry-engaged academic observers, but as the
institution is defined more broadly to encompass non-traditional
players a broader perspective is needed. Even had the legacy press
done a better job and avoided its various “failings” the institution
would still be facing an existential crisis. The market failure of
community-based journalism has revealed the limits of for-profit
newsgathering, and that the costs of serious journalism had been
artificially covered up by the monopoly position that daily news
occupied in local advertising. No amount of internal professional
reform would have been able to resist the damage caused by the
stripping away of so much revenue by information and platform
competitors. And surely the populist threat has come in spite of
efforts at better public engagement and new experiments in
professional initiatives like “solutions journalism.” But that doesn’t
mean a full institutional accounting is not overdue.

Rethinking the institution

Any discussion of the institutional press must consider the vastly
more complex networked public sphere, and this is perhaps the
biggest challenge of the present book. As the media eco-system has
become more diffused this naturally raises the question of whether it
is still possible to identify the institutional core of journalism and, if
so, where to find it. This task was not as difficult when the institution
was virtually synonymous with large news organizations, but
understanding the way forward requires looking beyond the
traditional newsroom to consider what constitutes a broader
structure. Here I draw on Chadwick’s (2013) idea of the hybrid
media system, which provides helpful guidance for understanding
what I might, for now, loosely call the journalistic hybrid institution.
In Chadwick’s case he takes a historical view to show how older ways
of operating have merged with newer ones, without a binary
distinction between old and new media and their associated logics.
“Older” media become taken up and combined into “newer” ones in a
process of “integration and fragmentation” to create continually
hybridizing forms. Taking such a historical vantage point, one can
see how “older and newer media logics in the field of media and
politics blend, overlap, intermesh, and coevolve” (2013: 4), and this
intersection becomes the point of greatest interest. More traditional
broadcasted televised political debates, for example, are also live-
tweeted and blogged, with political operatives responding to a
quickly unfolding media narrative. A US presidential impeachment
hearing is paused by the congressional committee chair to read a
presidential tweet directed at one of the testifying witnesses, to
which the witness and journalists respond almost in real time.
Tamara Witschge and her colleagues have recently reflected on how
the “hybrid turn” has influenced the field of journalism studies and
political communication more generally, pointing to Chadwick’s
book as a key intellectual development (Witschge et al., 2018). So, in
taking that turn we recognize above all that journalistic authority,
professional boundaries, and the structure of the organization itself
are projects under construction.
A hybrid media system, in addition to characterizing a “temporal”
historical transforming process, emphasizes how the system is
distributed across news organizations and various “non-journalists.”
The objects of interest are not clustered in one place, whether in a
single technology, platform, or organization, and there’s obviously
not the traditional distinction between media and audience. The
hybrid system provides yet a third perspective: on the iterative,
recursive, mutually affecting practices that no longer produce the
now antiquated “news cycle,” but rather a “political information
cycle.” Thus, Chadwick moves beyond the boundaries of old and new
media, of journalism and its audience, and of fixed norms, to ask
how they combine, become interdependent, and react to each other.
The emphasis lies in the hybridizing process that takes place over
time, in engagement among journalists, elites, and other actors in
the co-creation of media and the dynamic unfolding of action and
reaction. So, this complex notion of a hybrid system brings three
features: first, a temporal dimension, as old combines with new;
second, a distributed system of media, combining actors, norms, and
technologies; and, third, the idea of a cycle, a constantly
reciprocating interaction among the relevant components of the
system. The complexity and fluid dynamism of this kind of eco-
system make it difficult to study empirically (such as through
traditional variable analysis), often making necessary a more
granular approach to specific case studies (e.g., elections, or
WikiLeaks and other scandals), tracing the flow of influence and
engagement among stakeholders. A decentered media system is
surely a more accurate image of the current environment, with its
more challenging methodological issues, but it raises questions about
where political power still lies, not to mention the journalistic
institution itself. As a result, the idea of a stable, locatable institution
is in tension with the hybrid media system.
In order to better understand this new space, we need to consider
how the traditional concepts around the institution still guide many
investigations, which are rooted in newsrooms and the larger
industry they comprise. Even now, scholarly research projects focus
on traditional media organizations (even if shrinking in revenue and
authority), the roles of journalists in those organizations, and their
adaptations to technological innovation. A hybrid perspective alerts
us to new kinds of networked assemblages at a variety of levels that
figure into an emerging institution, and the cyclical engagements
that bundle them together. We need better conceptual tools to
understand the institutional crisis, and what may help address it, to
think about institutions and what they provide (stability, social
benefit), while accommodating the more radical, networked-
assemblage ideas that move away from structural determinism to
contingency and instability. Even so, in the middle of this messiness,
certain configurations at some point have to settle out and become
system-valued institutionalized conventions, regularities that are
available to observation and evaluation. In other words, networked
forms become quasi-institutionalized and routinized over time;
order, integration, and a division of labor emerge and endure.

The economic challenge

Against this backdrop lies the challenge of finding new business
models for journalism, whatever its hybridizing form. The post-war
US domination of advertising revenue by big media, lasting through
the end of the century, was in retrospect an anomalous moment in
institutional history, allowing generous funding for newsgathering as
a loss-leader. Following the internet-led disintegration of that
arrangement, what are the emerging revenue models at the local,
regional, national, and global levels – and how do they contribute to
the changing shape of the institution? The revenue model for the top
elite news organizations like the New York Times seems strong, but
elsewhere newspapers continue their long decline, with no end in
sight and the news profession experiencing ever greater precarity of
labor. Into that mix have entered foundation supporters and
subscriber-based models, although these have yet to find a reliable
and scalable formula. So, an “all of the above” approach seems to be
the direction for now. Unavoidably, we must also ask how the giant
social media distribution platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter,
bring a different revenue stream but also become themselves
institutional actors, who must take responsibility for its overall
sustainability. In any case, the market failure still in process forces
the need to distinguish between the institution and its economic
basis, de-conflating journalism from the commercial system that
supported it for so long.
I don’t propose to review all the business models that have been
proposed for journalism. Many are being tried as I write, and many
start-ups have failed in the search for an elusive sustainability. I do
want to think, however, about the implications of those models for
institutionality. In previous theorizing, the media have been
regarded as an institution to the extent that they found similar
solutions to a common problem – foremost of which was how to
make money. But that’s a journalistically agnostic way to define an
institution. In discussing the ways that journalism may survive
economically, we must couple that discussion with the broader
institutional mission. What kinds of economic support and business
models will best ensure that institutional values are preserved?

Normative aspirations
Finally, in confronting the institutional crisis, we need to think more
clearly about the aspirational goals we have for journalism. That
means foregrounding institutional values, and applying a more
explicit normative framework to the analysis of press performance.
In taking the institutional threat seriously we need to better
understand what factors help contribute to institutional performance
and resilience in the face of mounting criticism and threats to
journalistic authority. Norms have obviously long been a part of
theorizing about the press, its freedom, and its role in a democracy,
but in journalism studies norms have been treated largely as an
intramural struggle among journalists, who strategically articulate
certain norms in defense of their practices. Much of the time,
however, the normative questions recede into the background, more
implicit than fully articulated, much less a source of concern over
their erosion. Indeed, the idea for this book comes from my own
sense of disconnect between the serious threats to democratic
institutions, particularly the press, and discussions at scholarly
meetings. How can the apparent danger to the institutional press
that I perceive be reconciled with the theoretical frameworks and
empirical research that typify the fields of journalism studies and
political communication? Are they still able to adequately guide our
questions and accommodate the existential threat to journalism
itself? Historically, studies of journalism have offered examinations
of specific news operations, taking a vertical deep dive into an
organization and explaining it deeply, as Herbert Gans (1979)
notably did with Time, Newsweek, NBC, and CBS, or more recently
Nikki Usher (2014) in her work on the New York Times. But that
made it easy to conflate an organization with the institution more
generally. Now, with the more dispersed eco-system, the challenge is
to find the institutional linkages that bind it together. What are the
institutional values that may be gaining support across the
journalistic space, and what kind of practices contribute to them?
Others have recognized that we are “beyond journalism” (Deuze and
Witschge 2018), but where specifically beyond is it going? Beyond
the news industry or any particular news organization lies a broader
institution, which has come apart and is in the process of being
reconstituted. But into what form will it coalesce? To what extent is
the kind of hybrid media system that is emerging a normatively
positive development? Chadwick himself posts a generally optimistic
conclusion, suggesting that contemporary forms of political
communication “are, on balance, more expansive and inclusive than
those that prevailed in the 20th century” (2013: 210). But these
outcomes are not always assured, and in his work the implications
for democratic systems are not directly explored. Understanding the
realignments of the hybrid system, however, helps set up the
questions that I want to explore. Who benefits from these new
alignments and do they contribute to better news flows and,
ultimately, to a healthy institution? In that context, what are the
more loosely coupled news-making assemblages of journalism and
the norms that guide their contribution to the institution? What are
the shared norms of interacting participants? How are the older
guardians of the institution fragmenting and realigning with friendly
newer voices? How are participants navigating this system, with the
transfer of norms and logics across platforms? We need a clearer
understanding of the institution in this new, more complex media
eco-system, where interactions are dynamic, contingent, and fluid,
and where no one seems to be in charge. What are the ways to reform
institutions to ensure functional outcomes? How can journalism be
institutional without being static and outmoded, professional
without mindlessly guarding its prerogatives, or elite without being
elitist? A broader view of that institution helps us understand these
threats, clarifies the emerging hybrid nature of the new media eco-
system, accepts the inadequacies of the old institution in disarray,
reminds us of our normative expectations for these new
arrangements, and provides a new way to think about journalism’s
importance to democratic life.

Plan of the book

Having laid out my general argument in this opening chapter, in the
remainder of this volume I will more fully develop and explore each
of these themes in turn.
Chapter 2 addresses the threat of populism and its attack on the
mainstream media, which has become such an integral part of its
political appeal. Contributing to this climate of institutional threat is
the rise of the carriers of this antagonism – the anti-mainstream,
hyper-partisan media.
Chapter 3 considers the concept of the institution and how different
research perspectives have approached institutional issues, yielding
different responses to questions of press performance. To better
understand these diverse perspectives, I introduce the beginning of a
typology of how the institution can be described at different levels of
analysis.
Chapter 4 examines the reasons why the institution itself is not
without fault and has been implicated in its own declining
trustworthiness. I recognize the conflicted nature of academic
observers themselves, pulled between the twin roles of critic and
champion. But we still need to find a way to diagnose the problems
of journalism without being unapologetic and uncritical institutional
defenders.
Chapter 5 proposes a broader perspective that goes beyond equating
the larger institution with the news industry, using the concept of the
hybrid institution to accommodate and describe the diverse elements
that contribute to institutional value and function. I fill out the
typology to describe new institutional forms that are not as easily
mapped onto the news organization template.
Chapter 6 brings in the question of how journalism can be
economically sustainable, with a review of some of the solutions and
reforms being tried, and their consequences for normative
institutional values. Certainly, institutional health will require having
the resources necessary for doing the expensive work of reporting,
from whatever the source may be, but the way forward is still by no
means clear. In any case, the economic conversation has served to
de-conflate the institution from the commercial system with which it
has been so closely tied.
Finally, Chapter 7 takes up the normative context for the institution
more directly, considering how to judge new developments and
innovations against the kind of values we seek for journalism to
uphold for society. We can be scientific through empirical
investigation, without being agnostic about concerns for the survival
of the institutional press, but that means being more explicit about a
moral vision for journalism.

Notes
1 “9 Charts About America’s Newsrooms,” Pew Research Center,
November 26, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2019/11/26/9-charts-about-americas-newsrooms.
2 “Holding the Line Against Duterte’s Attacks,” RSF Reporters
Without Borders, https://rsf.org/en/philippines.
2
Enemies of the Institution
The institutional press is under attack on many fronts, but one of the
most direct threats is political, especially to the extent it involves the
repressive authority of the state. Powerful antagonists threatened by
the values of the press have waged a steady assault, not only against
specific stories and journalists but on the very legitimacy of the press
itself. Part of this attempt grows from the current populist moment:
in the US with Trump, the UK with Brexit, and elsewhere around the
world. These attacks have taken their toll, playing an important part
in the long-term decline in journalistic authority and trust in the
institution, with press freedom around the world declining according
to Freedom House to the lowest point in thirteen years.1 The mission
statement of the new Center for Media at Risk at the University of
Pennsylvania warns that “Political intimidation threatens media
practitioners worldwide, while disinformation campaigns destabilize
public trust.”2 Meanwhile, a post-truth mentality, abetted by rising
authoritarian threats and a US president whose claims fail fact-
checking tests daily, strikes at the very epistemological basis of the
institution, weakening it yet further. These problems will not go
away with the departure of specific leaders, who have revealed, as
much as contributed to, serious cracks and vulnerabilities in the
system.
The crisis of the press is part of a larger one for institutions in
general, so their broader social value must be understood and
appreciated. We should be concerned about the erosion of norms
and institutions because recent histories show that democracies
erode more from within than from external attack and violent
overthrow, as demonstrated by the recent experience of Venezuela,
Hungary, and Turkey (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). In his timely
volume, On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, Yale
historian Timothy Snyder examines parallels with World War II-era
Europe to raise the alarm over an encroaching political totalitarian
threat. Among his twenty cautionary lessons in resistance, Snyder
gives prominence on his list to the importance of institutions,
warning that we must: “Defend an institution. Follow the courts or
the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of ‘our
institution’ unless you are making them yours by acting on their
behalf. Institutions don’t protect themselves. They go down like
dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning” (2017: 22).
Snyder emphasizes constitutional institutions, including the
constitutionally protected press, conceived as positioned between the
state and the otherwise isolated individual. Institutions, and the
closely related bodies of professionals who inhabit them, are valuable
because they operate based on rules, rules that don’t change with
circumstances and those in power. These structures buffer against
the exercise of arbitrary power because their workings are known
and predictable, not a black-boxed secret methodology. Political
polarization poses a particular threat to democracy when
unconstrained by accepted institutional frameworks, descending into
a conflict not between policy options but between friend and foe.
When one side regards the other as not just having policy
disagreements but as an illegitimate existential threat, then the
common ground gives way to fear, rule-breaking and doing anything
to win. This poses a dilemma for the targets of attack, who must
choose whether to respond in kind or continue within the
traditionally accepted rules (Hillary Clinton for a time in her
campaign advocated that “when they go low, we go high”). To
become equally ruthless, so that the conflict deteriorates into a street
fight, risks accelerating the demise of the institutions themselves,
which offer the only way out of that polarized stand-off.
This chapter explores the roots of these institutional threats, in
populist ideology, the media system that supports it, and the closely
related post-modern challenges to journalistic epistemology. The
epistemological threat, the fractured consensus on how we know
what we know, didn’t originate with populism, but has certainly been
exploited by it. The rhetoric of media bias, with critical frameworks
drawn from media literacy and social theory, has long been a staple
of movements on both the left and right, but the right has gone
further with amplifying its rhetoric to successfully create an
important parallel media universe. A right-wing media complex now
supports these attacks on journalism – including Fox News,
Breitbart, and extremist alt-right websites, which have gone to the
furthest extreme in creating a post-truth mentality and weaponizing
the results. This counter-institutional space does not play by the
traditional ethical rules of journalistic fairness and responsibility,
but uses a core antipathy toward the so-called mainstream media
(“MSM”) as an integral part of its ideology.

Anti-media populism
As a basis for much of the current political threat, populism plays an
important role in challenging the institutional press as an integral
part of its larger political program. Indeed, an anti-institutionalism
unites populist movements around the world, leading to the same
concerns, even if in widely varying national settings. Populism itself
is a cross-disciplinary, often ambiguous concept, widely invoked yet
highly contested, an abstract set of ideas expressed differently
depending on the political contexts. Because I want to better
understand the position it takes regarding media, populism is
usefully regarded as a communication style. Jagers and Walgrave
describe it as a master communication frame “that appeals to and
identifies with the people and pretends to speak in their name”
(2007: 322). As a political logic, populism organizes itself around the
people in anti-systemic opposition to elites, making it widely
appropriated across the political spectrum, and used to
accommodate figures as diverse as Donald Trump and Bernie
Sanders in the US, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Hugo Chávez in
Venezuela, and India’s Narendra Modi. All populism invokes, by
definition, a construction of the people, but also can include some
combination of anti-elitism and exclusion of out-groups. Jagers and
Walgrave classify a populist construction organized only around the
people to be empty, or mainstream populism, while other forms add
to that an anti-elitism, or an out-group excluding dynamic – with
the presence of all three characterized as thick or complete populism.
In thick populism the people are led to believe the game is rigged
against them, with elites implicated in the rules that favor the
undeserving other, which of course makes immigration an easily
exploitable issue for populists around the world. If a vertical axis
describes the people as located somewhere between opposition to
elites above and unworthy parasites below, a horizontal dimension
positions the deserving people on the insider side, as an ethnically
and culturally homogeneous us, against on the other side the
outsiders, those others who threaten them (Brubaker 2017).
This emphasis on an abstractly drawn, virtuous people, exploited by
the outsider, leads Stenner and Haidt (2018) to regard populism as
more “zeitgeist” than enduring ideology. They argue that it gains
meaning only when coupled with what Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017)
call a “host ideology,” as in “far-right” populism. This explains how
Trump – who has not exhibited a well-articulated belief system or
traditional ideology of conservatism, but instead favors a
transactional emphasis on media events and personal “wins” – has
adopted a populist playbook, while relying on co-dependent political
allies to flesh out as needed the specific ideologically derived policy
proposals. It is this far-right populism that concerns me most here,
with its coupling of elites to media and experts, and arousing of
intolerant emotional attacks against out-groups. As Stenner and
Haidt describe it, this is a demand for less diversity (which couples
easily with white nationalism), and an attack on leaders and
institutions deemed to have failed, leading to easily fueled suspicion
of the so-called deep state. In this context, the “deep state” serves as
a convenient target for the right-wing, a form of conspiracy theory
popularized by Trump and his supporters as a short-hand reference
to those unaccountable elements in government deemed to be
operating out of sight and in opposition to political control. Like the
charge of “fake news,” blaming the deep state makes for a
convenient, elastic, and non-falsifiable explanation, as a strategic
rhetorical device for attacking opponents and short-circuiting
reasoned policy arguments. To the extent that the deep state refers to
enduring and non-politicized alliances and practices, which are not
susceptible to corrupting political pressure and the shifting vagaries
of the moment, we might also call it an institution.
Populism has a deep antagonism toward the establishment and the
media, which are bound to that establishment through ties of mutual
interest and respect. That means it groups media with a predictable
array of enemies and works on the principle of exclusion. The
virtuous people are pitted against the corrupt elite, which naturally
becomes equated with expertise – scientists, educators, and, of
course, media – preparing the ground for conspiracy theories
(Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008). Among the populist amplifiers,
the National Rifle Association, through spokespeople like Dana
Loesch and Wayne Lapierre, has picked up this charge, declaring
explicitly that “It’s up to us to speak up against the three most
dangerous voices in America: academic elites, political elites, and
media elites … These are America’s greatest domestic threats … they
want to use their media to oppose our country!”3 This far-right
populism, while describing a communication style, also features an
authoritarian dynamic, which Stenner and Haidt (2018) argue is not
specifically a form of status quo conservatism but rather an “aversion
to complexity,” with authoritarians being better described as
“simple-minded avoiders of complexity more than close-minded
avoiders of change” (Stenner 2009: 193). Political scientists draw
distinctions between the hyper-nationalism of fascism and
authoritarianism as a governing style, but both easily lead to the
suppression of press freedom. While Trump may not be a fully
authoritarian leader, he exploits an authoritarian dynamic that
explains why, as a far-right populist, he has been able to generate so
much support with simplistic slogans (“Build the Wall”) and
emotional appeals (“American carnage”), which play well on hyper-
partisan media platforms. This aversion to complexity does not favor
an institutional press that is predicated on investigation rather than
attack. If populism is a communication logic based on an anti-
institutional attack, authoritarianism is a governing style that
actually puts that logic into action and does the work of
circumventing established institutions.
These fears exploited by the authoritarian dynamic are not transitory
political trends but are rooted in legitimate non-trivial concerns,
including rising economic inequality and precarious employment
prospects, even if distorted by the populist lens. Globalization has
produced winners and losers, greatly transforming social
relationships. Not surprisingly, many workers are no longer able to
compete when open trade crosses national boundaries, as promoted
by neoliberal ideology, so the sense of loss and grievance among the
losers has fueled much of the political dynamic. Local spaces become
more strategically privileged to the extent that they are plugged into
these global circuits – global cities, for example, as described by
Saskia Sassen (1991). People are plugged in too, and gain strategic
advantage if they are positioned to take advantage of these global
connections. Global networks operate at a level transcending local
communities, creating a sense of powerlessness for those affected by
power at a distance. In the view of Manuel Castells, one is either
plugged into the Network Society or left behind, either part of the
connected elite or finding refuge in defensive communes of
reactionary racism, nationalism, and xenophobia – groups easily
exploited by authoritarian forces. As I’ll return to later in this
volume, Castells’ in-or-out framework does not anticipate how these
movements of exclusion and extremism have themselves become
networked in ways that are not the sole province of the elite global
cosmopolitan – a networked authoritarianism has been catching up
with the more firmly entrenched and more liberal, Davos-style
networked cosmopolitanism.
In any case, as Castells argues, this network-based dichotomy drives
a corresponding difference in the ethos on either side: those who are
part of the global networks of power and enjoy their advantages
(loosely termed the elite) have the luxury of constructing their
individualistic cosmopolitanism, while those cut off from those
networks will turn in their disenfranchisement to traditional codes of
culture, nationalism, and religion for meaning and purpose. Pitting
the globally networked elite against the reactionary disenfranchised
captures an important dynamic of globalization, helping explain
what Kreiss calls the “surprising rootedness of network identity”
(2018: 15). That’s the irony of the rise of this new form of globalized
social organization, that it does not displace traditional appeals for
finding meaningful identity, but gives them even greater potency.
This divide implicates journalism itself, with its more universalized
institutional ethos, aligned with the cosmopolitan values of the
global elite, while the reactionary forms of traditionalism fall on the
other side. Kreiss shows how the alt-right news platform, Breitbart,
supports themes of “identity fundamentalism,” a form of identity
politics centered around white Christian nationalism, based on
exclusion, and in opposition to pluralistic, multi-cultural democracy
– and certainly in opposition to global cosmopolitanism: “At its
heart, the defensive cultural commune of the alt-right is a rejection
of the pluralism that defines contemporary multi-cultural
democracy” (2018: 24). The institutional press has aligned itself
historically with those very values, in seeking to provide a civic good
for pluralistic communities and helping other institutions work. So
it’s no wonder that, as a global enterprise, journalism is under
assault. Identity politics has given rise to fractures around
epistemology which provide the basis for the most serious attack on
the legitimacy of journalism, undermining confidence in the
possibility of it ever being able to adequately produce knowledge
about the civic world.

The epistemological threat

Just a few years ago “fake news” referred to topical comedic satire
based on news of the day, including The Daily Show, The Colbert
Report, and The Onion. Now Trump has single-handedly elevated
the charge of fake news into mainstream discourse and, as he’s at
times openly revealed, strategically used the term to refer to any
information he doesn’t like. And that strategy has consequences.
Research has shown that frequent discussions of “fake news” lowers
levels of trust in the media (Van Duyn and Collier 2018), along with
other dysfunctional effects. Trump’s antagonism toward journalists
has been well documented, with him even floating at one time the
possibility of stripping press credentials from news organizations
deemed too negative. Meanwhile, he has continued in the political
arena his long pre-presidential business strategy of aggressive
litigation, filing libel suits against the New York Times, the
Washington Post, and CNN – unlikely to succeed but potentially
ruinous for organizations with fewer financial resources. More
seriously still, his branding the press as a treasonous enemy is a new
low for a US president. His efforts to discredit journalism have been
picked up by campaign and administration surrogates, and have
included researching the backgrounds of journalists, and even their
family members, to find derogatory information intended to
embarrass and delegitimize news outlets and reporters critical of the
president. PEN America, an advocacy group for freedom of
expression, responded to reports of this new assault, calling it
“insidious,” adding that “It is the role of the press to hold
government accountable, and they must be able to do so without fear
of retribution.”4 This kind of attack has nothing to do with policy
disagreements or arguing a political position, but reflects the
populist dynamic of friends vs. foes, where any means of attack, even
ad hominem, is fair game.
Trump is clearly not alone in exploiting the press as a target. Indeed,
other national leaders have picked up the same practice, making
“fake news” a global phenomenon. News outlets on the tabloid fringe
may not produce explicitly fake news but they have a long tradition
of sensationalized and misleading reports. Fear-mongering by the
UK’s Daily Mail and others, for example, has serious political
consequences and played a major role in swinging public opinion in
favor of Britain voting to leave the European Union. The impact of
this so-called “low quality” news is amplified when shared on social
media, providing fodder for partisans and yielding a dysfunctional
climate of misinformation (Chadwick, Vaccari, and O’Loughlin
2018). Genuine fake news, which sounds like an oxymoron, is indeed
a serious problem – the kind generated by Russian, Chinese, and
other state-directed operations, or by private profit-seeking “troll
farms,” and spread by automated bots. But used too broadly the
charge distracts attention from the real problem and delegitimizes
serious journalism. Indeed, this strategy of delegitimation has
become deeply rooted in populism as a political logic and
communication style of attacking the epistemological basis of
journalism. In this dynamic, the leader must necessarily undermine
the ability to find the truth outside of the closed system that the
leader seeks to establish. As Hannah Arendt (1951) wrote in her
classic Origins of Totalitarianism, millions in the mid-twentieth
century had come to believe that “everything is possible and nothing
is true.” Tyranny is historically antagonistic toward verifiable reality.
Thus, the fake news charge may be a rhetorical weapon but has a
more serious message in laying the groundwork for undermining the
very possibility of truth, and the institution that claims to be its
carrier.
But the so-called “post-truth era” has not come about solely as a
result of direct political attack. Currents within social theory have
also been responsible for sowing the seeds of distrust, with the catch-
all category of post-modernism a frequently cited culprit. The
possibility of accumulating knowledge toward an ultimately
knowable truth has been replaced with the inevitability of different
narratives and interpretations. Post-modernism is too broad a
theoretical and cultural set of ideas to easily pin down here, but in
displacing a unitary truth with multiple narratives the stage is set for
a different way of thinking about communication. Information
campaigns, for example, become a matter not of communicating the
truth but of controlling the “narrative.” Rejecting the philosophical
impossibility of a singular objective truth is not the same, however,
as giving up on an agreed-upon, reasonable system for claims-
making. But this has been the result of cynically exploiting the post-
modern sensibility for political advantage. Many others have
addressed the post-truth idea, now well established in the lexicon
(e.g., Gladstone 2017; Kakutani 2018; McIntyre 2018), so there’s no
need for a thorough review, but I do want to connect this theme to
institutional concerns.
The idea of reality being socially constructed provides a valuable
perspective on how the social shapes the search for meaning, a
meaning that is not just handed to us pre-made. We do receive and
inhabit categories we did not create, but we build meaning from
them. Mental illness, for example, has biological roots, but to a large
extent is understood through social categories and labelling of
deviance, which have changed over time. Sex categories have a
biological basis, but gender roles are conditioned by a patriarchal
culture. The distinction, however, gets lost in the popular discourse,
with the idea of phenomena being constructed becoming tantamount
to them being fabricated out of whole cloth. And a deconstructionist
approach to theory and critique has promulgated distrust in the
traditionally accepted, high-credibility institutions tasked as truth-
finding mechanisms. In the post-modern turn in the humanities,
literary works became no longer containers of received wisdom and
cultural truths but texts waiting to be deconstructed. Even in science,
the place where the most rigorous quest for knowing the real world is
presumed to be carried out, science and technology studies
introduced the idea of routines, blind spots, and paradigmatic
assumptions. But the goal of this STS project was not to undermine
the benefits and possibility of science but to recognize that science is
also a social practice in need of better understanding. That hasn’t
comforted scientists, however, who have felt attacked by their social
science colleagues. One of the figures most associated with this
analysis, Bruno Latour, argues in his defense that it doesn’t mean
there can’t be good science, just that “scientists should explicitly
state their interests, their values, and what sort of proof will make
them change their mind” (de Vrieze 2017).
Like science, journalism is a truth-seeking enterprise, and has faced
a similar epistemological challenge from the academy. The sociology
of news, for example, has a strong constructionist theoretical strand,
emphasizing that news is not something “out there,” but constructed
as a form of newswork. That approach provided valuable insights
during the era of institutional high modernism, including the golden
age of television news in the 1960s and ’70s, when a more unitary
and less problematic picture of the world was presented. With
tellingly constructionist titles like Fishman’s (1980) Manufacturing
the News this perspective considered how routines, news values, and
unstated professional rules all are necessary in allowing journalists
to tame the unpredictable flow of events and produce a marketable
product on schedule. The phenomenological perspective adopted by
sociologists of news like Gaye Tuchman (1978), with her book,
Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality, shows how
journalists see the world in an active effort to make it meaningful –
and manageable. In her ethnographic work, objectivity is shown to
be not an immutable stance toward finding the truth, but a strategy
for meeting the practical need to fend off outsider criticism.
Objectivity becomes a “strategic ritual” that if followed allows its
performers to defend themselves in claiming they followed the rules.
In my own work, I have understood media content to be a joint
product of an array of institutional, political, economic, and cultural
forces (reviewed in Shoemaker and Reese 2014). But just because an
overdetermined news product is affected by a host of factors, and the
work that goes into it can be examined as a form of social practice,
that doesn’t mean it’s fabricated – or that the institution itself should
be rejected. Journalists make news, but they don’t make it up. Some
institutionalized practices are more reliable than others, but that
doesn’t diminish their entire civic value.
The critical theory used to deconstruct these enterprises, whether
literary, scientific, or journalistic, seeks to unmask power and lay
bare the interests at work behind the scenes. But critical work has
been appropriated from the academy toward less progressive ends,
to undermine larger institutional values. Right-wing partisan media
critics have little in common politically, for example, with media
critics Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, but that hasn’t
prevented such critics from using their widely influential works, such
as Manufacturing Consent (1988), to support a blanket
condemnation of the mainstream media. Herman and Chomsky’s
Propaganda Model depicts media as affected by a number of “filters,”
including ownership, advertising, and using elites as sources, which,
when combined, produce material serviceable to the status quo.
Rather than understanding media as a product of interests that must
be taken into account, and where possible resisted, partisan
provocateurs like James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas invoke this
critique as a more general epistemological threat against journalism.
As O’Keefe tweeted during the 2016 campaign: “You are watching
what @dailychomsky wrote about in Manufacturing Consent in real
time. Media forces narrative and elects their candidate… .”5 As he
later said to Rush Limbaugh, “the real deception is passing along
information to the news consumer that’s not true [my emphasis] –
for economic reasons, political reasons, or maybe to not rock the
boat. Noam Chomsky, no right-winger, said the media is propaganda
due to various market forces.”6 As in his so-called reporting, O’Keefe
takes Herman and Chomsky out of context, employing a self-serving
analysis of the media system to suggest intentional, not systemic,
deception, and the inability of the media to provide the kind of
“truth” that he himself is able to uncover through his own deceptive,
out of context, and by journalistic standards unethical, undercover
work. In this disingenuous exploitation of critical theory, the left has
been “played” by a cynical and well-funded program of media attack.
In its media criticism section, labelled “Big Journalism,” the
Breitbart news site takes a somewhat similar strategy, featuring a
critique similar to that made by the many scholarly studies of
newsroom sociology – arguing that in supporting elite interests and
the status quo journalism violates the norm of objectivity. This is a
self-serving and cynical position, however, given Breitbart’s stated
mission of the “full destruction and elimination of the entire
mainstream media,”7 and replacing it with a journalism in the
service of identity-based political interests. In this respect,
Breitbart’s media attack uses a form of critical jujitsu, invoking
accepted professional practices and news norms while turning that
critique on its head to endorse a different kind of epistemology –
appropriating for itself authoritative standing in the process.
The general public also has access to the spirit of these theoretical
critiques, even if they are not familiar with the studies themselves or
able to assign specific conceptual labels to their discontent. People
certainly have more access to media criticism than ever before, and,
with more alternative accounts available, the process behind news
decision-making is no longer taken for granted. The early popular
accounts of political communication played on what was once an ill-
informed view of how campaigns worked, leading to works like Joe
McGinnis’s (1969) reporting on Nixon in the Selling of the President,
with the revealing insight, for the time, that candidates were
marketed like any other consumer product. About the same period,
Edward Epstein’s (1974) News from Nowhere argued that television
news – then a highly credible institution – was not the all-seeing eye
that brought the day’s events into America’s living rooms, but
covered stories that could be handled cheaply, within budgetary
constraints, and were likely to attract an audience. Both works, and
others like them, were noteworthy correctives at the time, precisely
because they responded to a more trusting, even somewhat naive,
public relationship with social institutions. That view seems quaint
by today’s standards for a dubious public, which has long since given
up on an unproblematic media. Media literacy education has
encouraged this awareness, but has produced a great irony in the
process. Some critics have argued that in problematizing media these
seemingly worthy efforts to educate media consumers have, counter-
intuitively, led to greater cynicism, undermined trust in media
credibility, and cast doubt on the actual possibility of accurately
representing the world. Dana Boyd (2017), for example, argues this
point: that media literacy has backfired, by allowing critical thinking
to become an anti-expert stance. Encouraging people to do their own
research, for example, in her view opens the door for relying on a
range of dubious personal testimonies, questionable sources, and
conspiracy theories. Media need to be problematized, to uncover the
unseen forces that shape the symbolic environment, but not to the
extreme of negating a vital institutional role.
The anti-MSM industry
The rise of populism has heightened the attacks on the press in
recent years, as indicated earlier, by pitting it more explicitly against
the people and their leader, and in linking media to other discredited
elites. But media have been a political target more broadly for some
time and been criticized from different ends of the political
spectrum. In emphasizing the primary influence of capital,
ownership, and elite interests, the left has not targeted the
institutional level specifically, and therefore, I would argue, this
critique has not explicitly been intended to undermine journalism
itself, or cast doubt on its essential epistemological underpinnings.
The right-wing, on the other hand, has been particularly devoted to
delegitimizing the very basis of traditional journalism and has
developed the most aggressive and, over time, popularly accepted
critique of the institutional media. Before the rise of populist figures
like Trump, the conservative political movement had promoted a
now-familiar “liberal-bias” and anti-mainstream media critique as an
article of faith in Republican talking points and conservative ideology
more broadly, as a core element of what’s been aptly called the
“outrage industry” (Jamieson and Cappella 2008; Berry and Sobieraj
2014). This has proved an effective rhetorical strategy (since Richard
Nixon in the modern era), but has taken on particular virulence in
recent years. Although politically motivated reporting has a tradition
dating back to long before the twenty-first century, the internet has
intensified the ability to stoke the outrage machine. And attacks on
journalists are a core part of that outrage, as seen most dramatically
when President Trump points to the press corps covering his rallies
– eliciting predictable boos from the crowd and occasional violence.
Vigorous attacks on the mainstream media (or, dismissively,
“lamestream media”) project the image of an identifiable and highly
cohesive institutional press, which the MSM label suggests – even
adding Hollywood to the mix in searching for objectionable bias. So,
this critique deserves special attention as I consider institutional
boundaries and shortcomings. Although a misguided diagnosis in
many respects, the conservative critique, even if not systematically
representative in its selective evidence-gathering, does point to some
stable institutional qualities. Journalists are more liberal than the
average citizen, and, like any institution, susceptible to charges of
elitism, blind spots and group-think (which I’ll take up in greater
detail in Chapter 4). But these critics of the mainstream media have,
I would argue, little interest in good faith institutional reform.
Just as a conservative counter-establishment developed from the
1950s to contend with the liberal political class, with help from
prominent American movement leaders like William F. Buckley, a
counter-media establishment has taken root as well with its own
elaborate eco-system. Whereas Buckley was willing to “debate” a
liberal Gore Vidal during the 1968 national political convention
broadcast, the right-wing eco-system now functions as an
interconnected set of fellow authorities, building on and referencing
each other to feed followers a self-reinforcing messaging. Carlson
(2017) deconstructs this discourse of media criticism in what he calls
the “mythology of left-wing bias,” which serves to simultaneously
delegitimate the mainstream press while reinforcing the virtue of this
partisan right-wing media structure. So, beyond their often dubious
objective merits, these attacks on media primarily serve a rhetorical
purpose. Academic research, meanwhile, has given extensive
attention to media bias as a scholarly issue, with countless content
analyses and surveys of journalists. Certainly, there are structural
biases to be found, but this research has found little evidence of
intentional and overt political bias, at least in an electoral campaign
context. This, however, has had little success in quieting partisan
critics, but research has paid relatively little attention to the right-
wing media sphere where these accusations are enflamed (exceptions
include the work of Berry and Sobieraj 2014).
It should be noted that scholarly perspectives on media bias are
affected by the national environment. The US social science tradition
has approached the issue from firmly within the framework of
American electoral politics, producing more media-affirming and,
from that perspective, less worrisome results. British media studies,
however, have taken a more critical position regarding institutional
press performance. That is understandable, given the more
prominent historical pattern of overtly partisan sensationalism in the
British tabloid media, which has led to a more pointed scholarly
critique, especially of right-wing media, carrying over into critiques
of even the ostensibly objective BBC. These efforts have included
Stuart Hall’s more explicitly ideological cultural studies, theorizing a
deeper form of bias based on reliance on certain cultural authorities
as the “primary definers” and contributing to a “spiral of
amplification” (e.g., Hall 1978). In the same period, the work of the
Glasgow Media Group (e.g., 1976, 1980) provided an early model for
a more systematically empirical evaluation of media structural bias,
collecting transcripts and broadcasts and linking messages to issues
of war, labor relations, and other controversies (labor makes
“demands”; management makes “offers”).
This constant drumbeat of opposition from the counter-institutional
attack has affected the institution in less obvious ways, as the press
responds to criticism from opponents and absorbs some of their
critiques. The journalism profession, for example, has traditionally
taken many of its conservative critics more seriously than is
warranted because their accusations attribute media bias to
individual prejudice, which ironically is understandably preferred by
professionals themselves because it at least grants them some credit
for decision-making autonomy. With its focus on commercialism,
ownership, and interlocking conflicts of interest, the left critique not
surprisingly attracts much less attention from the commercial media,
where these issues are off-limits. In fact, a veteran reporter for ABC
News was suspended recently after indiscreetly criticizing ABC’s
parent corporation Disney and acknowledging that the “commercial
imperative is incompatible with news.”8 The steady promotion of the
“liberal-bias” rhetoric on the right has only increased this disparity in
the attention given the two critiques. The institution has in this
sense, while being overly fixated on the attacks on its right flank,
been able to skirt a reckoning of its more structural biases by
ignoring them.
Understanding the damage from these attacks, however, has become
more urgent. The popular partisan-media sphere began with the
success of radio’s Rush Limbaugh, Fox News on cable TV, and the
Drudge Report on the internet, but has grown in recent years to
include more reactionary online outlets like Breitbart and the
extremist platform InfoWars, once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy-
peddler. The irony of course is that a conservative pundit like Fox’s
Sean Hannity, one of the highest rated and highest paid figures on
the most successful cable news channel, can blame “the media” for
the country’s problems. This sphere has grown to include political
activists, like the previously mentioned James O’Keefe, who,
although criticized for his ethically questionable methods,
nevertheless is able to attract significant funding and attention with
his guerrilla tactics. He calls himself an investigative journalist
exposing corruption, making the mainstream media one of his
preferred targets – even while taking mentions in that very media as
an affirmation of his impact. The significance of this counter-
institutional space was illustrated by Trump’s hosting a “Social
Media Summit” at the White House on July 11, 2019, with small-
scale conservative influencers like O’Keefe, who touted Trump’s
gratitude on his website, underscoring how “mainstream” the anti-
mainstream media attacks have become!
Once a struggling start-up, the funds flowing into O’Keefe’s
operation from right-wing supporters have enabled him to
weaponize his undercover work against enemies of the
administration, including a labor union and a congressional
candidate. In the guise of what he claims is independent journalism,
this partisan attack machine has evolved, taking on a paramilitary
dimension with the help of security contractor Erik Prince. The
former head of Blackwater Worldwide, with close ties to the Trump
administration, Prince once met with Pentagon officials to advocate
privatizing the war in Afghanistan. More recently, it was reported
that he helped train Project Veritas operatives in espionage
techniques using a former MI6 agent and other intelligence experts.9
This development recalls another of Snyder’s lessons, to be wary of
paramilitaries: “When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official
police and military intermingle, the end has come” (2017: 42). With
consulting help from Prince, the paramilitary threatens to become
mediatized.
Although the anti-MSM attack has long been a core part of
conservative ideology, the partisan media sphere has given it much
greater amplification. Indeed, a cottage industry of media criticism
has developed, which enjoys a symbiotic relationship with
conservative media platforms. A number of think-tanks and
“research” centers provide information to conservative pundits to
support their attacks, while benefiting in turn from the exposure and
regular on-air citation. Compared, however, to the many academic
studies of media bias, based on systematic surveys and carefully
defined content analyses, these anti-MSM critiques come from
partisan actors who are in the “media-bias business,” cherry-picking
evidence and using “whataboutism” claims to decry what they
perceive as double standards. Even some prominent conservatives
have observed that the media-bias question has been weaponized,
turning an occasionally valid criticism of the press into something far
worse, a more insidious charge of intentional and active lying.
According to an article in Politico, the Media Research Center is one
of the most well-established and well-funded fixtures in the
anti-“liberal media” bias industry, which has a major financial
interest in painting journalism as a permanent enemy.10 This charge
of active lying in the media and the ultimate incapability of adequate
press performance, monetized by the bias industry, further
reinforces the already anti-MSM right-wing worldview. That view
has become incorporated into the Trump administration’s open
hostility toward journalists, which inevitably has become embraced
by violent extremists. These include a Florida man arrested in 2018
for sending sixteen pipe bombs to liberal opponents and media
figures, while living in a van covered with anti-CNN slogans.
This anti-institutional media discourse has become not only a
prominent feature of the partisan media in the US, but an integral
part of populist movements around the world. Populism itself is a
global phenomenon, and the seemingly global template for anti-
MSM critique helps it travel. But how successful it will be remains
uncertain. Breitbart, for example, even though embedded in US
journalistic culture, has been expanding internationally (with
bureaus in London and Jerusalem), and its former chairman Steve
Bannon has sought to make common cause with other alt-right and
populist-nationalist political groups, especially in Europe. But it’s
unclear whether a corresponding right-wing institutional media
structure will develop with a transnational nationalism that
parallels the organized efforts of traditional press advocates. Recent
research has begun to map this sphere, including analysis of right-
wing news sites in the US, Austria, and Germany, showing how they
present themselves as an alternative to the mainstream media
(Hellmueller and Revers 2017). In Hungary, right-wing outlets form
a “distinctive media universe” that plays an integral part in the media
framing network, making it possible for the radical right to thrive
politically. In Romania, however, the radical right media are more
isolated from the mainstream and each other, restricting their
influence (Norocel, Szabo, and Bene 2017). Even Norway, with a
relatively well-trusted and publicly supported media system, has
yielded to the same kind of populist, anti-media ideology. An
analysis there of five right-wing, anti-immigration websites shows
they blame a vaguely defined “politically correct elite” establishment,
which includes media. These groups present themselves as part of an
international network, challenging the power of mainstream media
and frequently linking to fellow believers in the US, including
Breitbart and Gateway Pundit (Figenschou and Ihlebaek 2017). The
anti-MSM industry, then, has become a global enterprise.

Institution and counter-institution

The rise of the right-wing media poses a number of important
epistemological challenges to the institutional press, beyond
amplifying charges of media bias as a rhetorical attack. These hyper-
partisan media have by their existence brought into question the
traditional operating rules of journalism. The inclusion of these
partisan elements in the media sphere undoubtedly has fractured the
previous homogeneity and coherence of journalistic rules, and raises
the question of what actually qualifies an organization for
institutional membership. To what extent are these news outlets,
even in their oppositional stance, part of the press? Arguably, they
are not. Hyper-partisan media do not play by institutional rules, and
data show that they are much more prominent on the right than the
left.11 This asymmetry is mirrored on the audience side, with
conservative voters relying more on hyper-partisan news than do
liberal voters, a pattern that reflects other analyses of the news eco-
system, showing a clearly different kind of engagement between left
and right on the political spectrum. Traditional, non-partisan news
sites engage with liberal political groups, as demonstrated in a
network analysis of linking patterns, while the right-wing has
separated itself largely into its own self-reinforcing community,
declining to engage with professional journalism outlets (e.g.,
Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018). Still, even though a clear partisan
eco-system can be identified, classifying media as either institutional
or counter-institutional is not as straightforward as one might think,
and attempting to do so only highlights the unstated assumptions
and traditional definitions of the press that counter-institutional
media challenge and work to undermine. That classification requires
some disentangling of organizational elements to unpack the
qualifications for institutional membership – taking into account the
larger dynamic flows within the partisan eco-system and across the
larger media space. In other words, an entire news organization may
not be easily classified as institutional or not, but certain
organizational elements and practices can be.
The Wall Street Journal, for example, represents in some ways a
quaint throwback to an earlier era, following the traditional
distinction of keeping the editorial opinion voice separate from the
straight news side of the house. The Journal’s editorial page for
many years has been a major voice of the conservative movement,
yet even under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership the organization would
certainly be regarded as part of the press. Opinion or news side, they
both accept and react to the institutional world. Other media,
however, are more difficult to neatly categorize. There are hybrid
elements even within the right-wing eco-system, which need to be
disentangled. Fox News, for example, established a new model of
news appealing to a conservative audience and became the most
successful cable news platform, but with an ambiguous institutional
identity. That ambiguity is not particularly evident if looking only at
the stridently partisan evening pundits, such as top-rated Sean
Hannity or Laura Ingraham, or the Trump-friendly and presidential
tweet-inspiring morning show, “Fox and Friends.” But it is more
evident elsewhere in other parts of the news division.
For example, the Fox News election polling and analysis team is a
conventional and autonomous professional operation within the
organization and has not distorted its analyses to match larger
partisan preferences. There is also a still-permeable boundary in the
exchange of personnel with more traditional networks. Former Fox
anchor Megyn Kelly, for example, was recruited by NBC, and Fox’s
reporters have moved in the other direction, such as White House
reporter Major Garrett being hired by CBS News as its Washington
correspondent. Fox reporters participate in White House briefings
along with other journalists, and at times their news figures have
been known to draw their own conclusions independent of the
dominant conservative narrative and talking points used to support
the administration. More traditional Fox journalists like Chris
Wallace, for example, have challenged officials in interviews –
usefully so, because its news side cannot be so partisan that it strays
too far from reality. That has led Trump to express displeasure even
with Fox over stories that are insufficiently positive toward him and
his supporters, creating internal tensions in the organization. He
went so far, in fact, as to recommend in an August 2019 message to
his millions of Twitter followers that they should find another news
outlet, because Fox, which had been a strong proponent, “isn’t
working for us anymore!” There are limits to this professional
autonomy, however. Commentators and discussion programs are
clearly directed to support the positions of Republican political
figures, and Fox does not perform the kind of self-reflective review of
its reporting that other news organizations do – retracting stories
only when legally forced to do so (Folkenflik 2017). Thus, it does not
contribute to the institution where it really counts, in terms of
upholding its normative values: the “fair and balanced” slogan was
disingenuous from the start. The ostensibly professional
newsgathering that is done keeps the audience from straying to other
outlets, and provides legitimizing cover for institution-undermining
narratives promoted by the rest of the organization.
A more complicated case is that of Breitbart, a platform for the alt-
right that gained success from its association with an early Trump
supporter and administration official, Steve Bannon. A network
analysis tracing the flows of influence shows that Breitbart occupies
a more influential position in the right-wing eco-system than even
Fox (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018). Although Breitbart and its
former chairman Bannon regard the traditional press as the
“Democrat-Media Complex,” even Breitbart is not always easy to
classify in all its organizational elements. It has, for example, a
correspondent assigned to the White House and features a
significant amount of original reporting. But packaging that
reporting within a more all-encompassing ideological wrapper
signals narratives to a wider community, while providing an online
forum for building on those narratives. A lengthy 2017 investigation
by the New York Times quoted editor-in-chief Charles Spiering
saying that he accepted the job provided he could report “straight
news,” and according to the writer the stories produced for the site
don’t show any more explicit bias than a typical newspaper. Breitbart
doesn’t use the same language as more incendiary, anti-Semitic sites
like the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, but it does help legitimize those
voices, who link to the site for validation with their supporters and
gather in comment sections to promote their ideology.12
Unpacking Breitbart means not oversimplifying but testing
assumptions about the platform’s content, and making distinctions
between the publishers, such as (formerly) Steve Bannon, inserting
their own populist ideology from the top and the multi-cultural,
serious-minded staff reporters (including a hire from the Wall Street
Journal) from below, with the editor caught in the middle – even
being called “traitor in chief” by others in the right-wing media
sphere.13 An anonymous activist group, Sleeping Giants, has
attacked Breitbart by alerting major advertisers that their messages
are appearing on the site, leading many of those companies to block
the site from their list of acceptable media. Breitbart editor
Alexander Marlow has responded with an appeal to institutional
values, saying that the strategy used by Sleeping Giants was a threat
not only to his site but to free speech: “No one [in the media
business] has said anything to defend Breitbart … No one is standing
up and saying, ‘This is about Breitbart now. But it could be about us
tomorrow.’”14 Here is a particular irony, for the editor of an
institution-undermining outlet like Breitbart to cry out for defenders
to close ranks in its support. So, this right-wing corner of the eco-
system has a powerful integrated messaging influence on public
discourse – but obviously an uneasy and at times ambiguous
relationship with the institutional press, even if on the whole
oppositional. This masquerading by the partisan media as legitimate
journalism while failing to adhere to its values makes its
delegitimation of the institutional press even more insidious. To the
degree that it includes straight news and relies on legitimate
information sources, Breitbart provides its readers with just enough
grip on reality to boost its own claims as a plausible alternative to the
mainstream media.
Other sites have adopted a similar playbook, claiming to be doing
journalism but challenging the traditional institution – while
promoting a different kind of epistemology, one based on partisan
and not empirical truth. The hyper-partisan eco-system is changing
rapidly, but political messaging entrepreneurs have found creative
ways to exploit these spaces and monetize this kind of partisan
epistemology, building content-farms that require relatively little
investment in personnel, and taking advantage of the large
platforms, while staying one step ahead of their restrictive terms of
service. The Phoenix-based WesternJournal.com is one particularly
prominent example of such sites on the right, having had posts on
Facebook in early 2019 ranked as high as the combined number for
the top ten US news organizations.15 The site was founded by Floyd
Brown, the experienced political marketing figure behind the
Citizens United US Supreme Court decision, and closely tied to pro-
Trump supporters. Previously a non-profit called
WesternJournalism.com, the site anchored a web of related
Facebook pages and publishers, and was frequently called out for
distributing misinformation by professional fact-checking
organizations. WJ in its current rebranded form has the appearance
of a news organization, but almost all its content is aggregated from
other sources, using writers operating under pseudonyms, and it has
no bureaus and no reporters doing first-hand investigation. The site
is a self-perpetuating outrage machine, using sensationalized stories
to rile up a partisan readership and reap profit from their responses
through advertising revenue on social media. Unlike a traditional
journalism organization, according to a report in the New York
Times, it functions “like a news outlet in reverse,” with narratives
selected for maximum political traction, centering around targets
and enemies of the president: “The message comes first, then facts
carefully selected to support it. Only after editors decide the framing
of a story, and write the headline, is it handed off to a pool of
contract writers.”16
Although the traditional right-wing partisan media space – based on
radio, television, and print – clearly has provided a powerful anti-
institutional attack, new and mutually reinforcing online flows have
contributed to ramping up those attacks in unprecedented ways.
These are hybrid flows, including, for example, the social news
platform Reddit, which allows users to post information and vote
posts up or down. One of the platform’s interest categories, a
“subreddit” devoted to the president (“The Donald”), often originates
narratives that later appear on more mainstream conservative
channels like “Hannity” on Fox News. Narratives are constantly
tested in such internet laboratories, spilling out onto radio shows,
and then to television. Alex Jones, proprietor of the InfoWars radio
program, managed an online site and YouTube page before they were
shut down, where he reposted videos from his radio show along with
ads for overpriced nutrition supplements. The “4chan” online
message board – which features anonymous xenophobic, racist, and
anti-Semitic messages – embraced Trump early in the political
campaign and continues to serve as a useful message-testing site.
Other components of this space include prominent conservative
aggregator hub-site the Drudge Report, and Twitter-based narrative-
setters such as Mike Cernovich. Through a process of monitoring and
amplification, narratives coalesce and generate memes that the
Trump administration often incorporates into the presidential
Twitter feed, illustrating the information cycle that is a feature of
hybrid media systems.

Conclusion
Delegitimizing attacks on the institutional press are deeply
embedded in right-wing politics, where critiques of media bias long
have been part of conservative ideology. They are well funded, and
the critique is even accepted, if at times grudgingly, within the
professional journalism world. But the rise in populist ideology has
given these attacks a much more virulent power, especially when
coupled with emerging media platforms. In these new online hybrid
forms, the coalescence of an MSM-opposing and delegitimizing force
poses a greater threat than the conventional and familiar media-bias
criticism from more conventional conservative voices. Given the
greater attention I have paid here to the right-wing populist corner of
the political world, one may question the relative importance of
attacks from different ends of the spectrum, and whether it is
accurate to focus on only one side. But once again, fairness does not
call for treating both sides equally in the name of balance, given the
asymmetry of the political attacks and their qualitative differences.
The evidence shows that the institutional threat is not evenly
distributed. Although the left has had its own longstanding tradition
of media critique, often influenced by Marxist-oriented class analysis
and with an emphasis on corporate control, this discourse does not
receive the same degree of attention, whether among the public or
the pundit class, nor does it have the same level of delegitimizing
power in challenging the underlying epistemology of journalism.
And, I would add, left-partisan media continue to find common
cause with professional journalism – a fact which conservative critics
may also use to make their point, to confirm their belief in the
profession’s liberal bias. But the left-professional alliance speaks
more in this context to whether partisan media are participating in a
larger media institution, or whether they line up in opposition to it,
as the right-wing more often does. The venerable left-wing opinion
journal The Nation, for example, partnered with the Columbia
Journalism Review in 2019 to promote a coordinated week-long
commitment by 170 news outlets on the issue of climate change,
leading up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit. They
included large publications, photo agencies, scholarly journals, and
non-profit sites, which signified a larger and shared institutional
ethos (Hertsgaard 2019).
In bringing a new network of partisan media actors into alignment,
the constant attack on the institutional press has become
systematized and easily monetized – growing beyond traditional
outlets and taking full advantage of YouTube, Facebook, and other
available digital platforms. Their attacks become even more powerful
when legitimated by the president and his media allies. Grasping the
nature of this new dynamic from the perspective of the hybrid media
system, and what it portends for journalism, has been difficult, and
we are only just beginning to recognize how these new flows work.
Understanding the institution, however, requires understanding its
enemies and the counter-institution that has amplified their attacks.
But classifying them into clear categories is not always possible: they
are interpenetrating, with fluid boundaries between them, bringing
the very definition of the institution into question. It is to this
analytical task of properly conceptualizing this institution that I turn
next.

Notes
1 “Press Freedom’s Dark Horizon,” Freedom House,
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/freedom-press-
2017.
2 See https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/annenberg-
video/culture-and-communication-videos-faculty-
videos/introduction-center.
3 “User Clip: NRA’s LaPierre: ‘Greatest Domestic Threats’ are
Academic, Political, Media ‘Elites,’” C-SPAN, April 28, 2017,
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4667607/nras-lapierre-greatest-
domestic-threats-academic-political-media-elites.
4 “Attempts by Trump Associates to Smear Journalists Designed to
Punish Reporters Into Silence,” PEN America, August 26, 2019,
https://pen.org/press-release/attempts-by-trump-associates-to-
smear-journalists-designed-to-punish-reporters-into-silence.
5 See
https://twitter.com/jamesokeefeiii/status/785572188573368320.
6 See
http://www.thelimbaughletter.com/thelimbaughletter/march_20
18/MobilePagedArticle.action?
articleId=1346792#articleId1346792.
7 “Breitbart’s Boyle: Our Goal is the ‘Elimination of the Entire
Mainstream Media,’” Breitbart, July 19, 2017,
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2017/07/19/breitbarts-
boyle-goal-elimination-entire-mainstream-media.
8 “ABC News Suspends Correspondent David Wright Over Secret
Video Footage,” Daily Beast, February 26, 2020,
https://www.thedailybeast.com/david-wright-suspended-by-abc-
news-over-mysterious-footage-says-report.
9 “Eric Prince Recruits Ex-Spies to Help Infiltrate Liberal Groups,”
New York Times, March 7, 2020,
 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/us/politics/erik-prince-
project-veritas.html?searchResultPosition=1.
10 “The Deep Roots of Trump’s War on the Press,” Politico,
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/04/26/the-
deep-roots-trumps-war-on-the-press-218105.
11 “Partisan Publishers and Political Content,” Newswhip,
http://go.newswhip.com/rs/647-QQK-704/images/Hyper-
Partisan%20Final.pdf.
12 “Down the Breitbart Hole,” New York Times, August 16, 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/magazine/breitbart-alt-
right-steve-bannon.html?_r0.
13 Ibid.
14 “The Mysterious Group That’s Picking Breitbart Apart, One
Tweet at a Time,” Washington Post, September 22, 2017,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-mysterious-
group-thats-picking-breitbart-apart-one-tweet-at-a-
time/2017/09/22/df1ee0c0-9d5c-11e7-9083-
fbfddf6804c2_story.html?utm_term=.c1d55a5a606e.
15 “In the Trump Era, a Family’s Fight with Google and Facebook
over Disinformation,” New York Times, August 21, 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/us/facebook-
disinformation-floyd-brown.html.
16 Ibid.
3
Defining the Institution
Although attacks on the press have generated great concern from
many quarters, academic media and communication research does
not seem to reflect particular concern over a crisis, focusing instead
on specific practices, technologies, and innovations. Concepts of
journalism, media, and news are too often used unproblematically
and taken for granted. Techno-utopians have even applauded the
implosion of the news industry, imagining that citizen expression
will move to the fore and widen the boundaries of civic discourse,
formerly policed by professionals. From that view, the institution is
synonymous with being staid, blinkered, old-fashioned, controlling,
self-righteous, and overdue for a thorough overhaul. Those who do
worry about a crisis use the language of institutions, but without
developing more fully an analysis of the kind of media practices the
institution embraces. Tim Snyder (2017), for example, is among
those alarmed over rising authoritarianism, but as an historian he
does not elaborate on what is meant by institutions, even while
advocating that they should be defended. For example, the nature of
the media institution is regarded as self-evidently obvious in his
recommendation that citizens support investigative journalism and
subscribe to a newspaper. So, scholars of authoritarianism and anti-
democratic political movements do not make journalism their focus,
while those observers who do closely study journalism and media
seem either unworried about the possibility of institutional collapse
or even celebrate its de-institutionalization (the latter response is
outlined in Kreiss 2016). As a result, these become two disconnected
and incomplete conversations.
Some maintain a trust in the inherent robustness of institutions,
especially in the US context, and assert that they will ultimately
endure beyond the present political moment. Others are much more
concerned that, once degraded, things are not easily set right again. I
find myself more in the latter camp, thinking that part of this
scholarly ambivalence stems from how the institution itself is
conceived. To talk about a crisis of the press means first being clear
about what is meant by an institution, a concept also at the heart of
so much alarm over the rise of illiberal trends. The definition of the
institution in turn affects how we diagnose the problem and what we
specifically wish to defend. Different theories of society shape how
we think about the threats to institutional survival and contribute to
these seemingly disconnected academic conversations. We need to
consider how best to think about institutions, the organizations
comprising them, and the norms in which they are rooted.
Understanding the possibilities for the institutional press requires,
as I will discuss, loosening those definitions based strictly on some
organizational form, and stretching them with the help of larger,
more networked concepts, which are also more sensitive to how
audiences take on a role as network actors. This chapter further
explores how institutions, particularly the press, have been defined
and approached analytically, and reviews their important
assumptions, in hopes of putting the crisis journalism faces in a
clearer perspective.

Definitional issues
The idea of the institution is used in so many different contexts, and
at so many levels of social life, that, as many have observed, this
elusive concept almost defies clear definition – even if we intuitively
know what it means. The term itself can refer to an organization or
the practices associated with it. Is the New York Times an
organization, a firm, or an institution? A university is a higher
educational enterprise, but it’s not uncommon to refer to it also as an
institution. The nature of institutions has been a core concern for
social science from the beginning, first systematically tackled in the
work of Weber and Durkheim, who asked how these systems become
legitimated, commanding and being freely granted moral authority.
At the micro-social level, institutions are simply structures guiding
individual thought and action. An idea, a social fact, takes hold and
becomes an acceptable or legitimated way to guide social action –
that is, institutionalized. Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1986)
regards the institution, at its most basic, as a convention, which is
agreed upon by those involved as a way to ensure social coordination
– whether in a family, game, or ceremony – so we don’t have to
“reinvent the wheel” in every circumstance, but this expansive
definition is little more than a widely accepted norm. When a rule of
thumb becomes institutionalized, taken in a sense out of the hands of
direct day-to-day participants, information becomes baked into the
rules. In fact, Pinch (2008) argues that technologies themselves are
powerful institutions, in the sense that rules are built into them,
allowing them to be reproduced in the same way every time. These
social choices are so embedded in technology that they become
invisible. Institutions are more complex than conventions but less
complex than the more complete societies and cultures they
constitute. Resources accumulate around these patterns,
strengthening their durability and power to impose order and
guidance. They evolve over time and adapt to threats, with previous
events shaping later ones, and with the more complex institutions
associated with a particular arena of social life. In his “grand theory”
approach to social systems, Talcott Parsons (1951) defined the
institution as a social structure with strategic significance, formed of
a stable number of interlocking roles. This is not far from
Huntington’s (1968: 12) widely cited definition: “Institutions are
stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior.”
We invoke the institution level when moving upward, toward
concerns over the larger value to society, apart from more specific
internal organizational features for which institutions provide the
larger context. More broadly, they are mediating structures – lying
somewhere between individual action and the larger social structures
of state and economy, supplying rules and procedures for the
expression of power in both directions. Institutional thinking bridges
theories of society and empirical-level studies of groups and
organizations, leading Mohr and Friedland to conclude that, for a
time after Parsons, “Institutions were everywhere and nowhere in
the social sciences” (2008: 422) – a conceptual vacancy filled by
renewed work on the larger institutional field by Bourdieu and the
new institutionalism work in organizational sociology. Adding to the
behavioral emphasis, this turn highlighted the interpretive and
discursive aspects of how institutions embody shared meaning.
Institutions guide action, as ways of doing business are accepted and
become cognitive guidelines for individual behavior. They
incorporate expectations below the level of awareness, but must be
constructed and made to mean something, as symbolic systems that
must be continually communicated. In their work helping to
establish so-called neo-institutional theory, Powell and DiMaggio
(1981) emphasize how organizations within a similar context tend to
become similar (or isomorphic) because they are responding to the
same institutional forces. This approach, grounded in organizational
theory, helps us understand social behavior, but with a value-neutral
empirical emphasis. How do things become institutionalized?
When this perspective was picked up in journalism studies, the
institution became largely defined with respect to its constituent
organizations: “as formal organizations or informal routines, scripts,
rules, or guidelines that stretch across organizations” (Ryfe and
Blach-Orsten 2011: 4), or as “social patterns of behavior identifiable
across the organizations that are generally seen within a society to
preside over a particular social sphere” (Cook 1998: 70). A more
network-based view, however, opens up new possibilities for
describing an institution that has grown to encompass more than its
traditional news organizations. This relational perspective,
advocated in sociology by Mohr and White (2008), emphasizes this
aspect, defining institutions as “linkage mechanisms,” or a system
composed of “interlocking relational networks.” This view is
consistent with the press infrastructure concept of Ananny, which he
defines as a system of “separations and dependencies,” of “loosely
coupled arrays of standardized elements” that combine to produce
an institution (2018: 60). This more networked view problematizes
the now increasingly artificial distinction between professional and
amateur.
For my purposes, it’s sufficient to have a definition that includes the
features most relevant for institutional survival, defined without
respect to pre-set organizational and professional boundaries:
An institution is a complex social structure formed by an
interlocking network of rules and activities, roles, technologies,
norms, and collective frames of meaning, which work together to
sustain its coherence, endurance, and value.
This definition identifies a number of key elements that drive several
important empirical questions. To what extent is there institutional
coherence and how are institutional structures continually being
reproduced around shared meanings? What are the social
sedimentations that accumulate around these structures? What
causes the practices in an institution to become valued, not only by
the participants but by the larger society? And to what extent does
that inspire legitimacy and corresponding moral obligations?
These questions become more timely as institutions become more
distrusted and undervalued, causing a crisis in their legitimacy and
moral authority. They have been criticized as corrupt, anti-
democratic, and out of step with the more organic social movements
that appeal to individualistic, non-conforming younger citizens. But
regardless of their faults, institutions are worth defending to the
extent they contribute to a moral purpose and bind together
historically the aspirational values they embody, connecting
members to their society – past, present, and future. At times of
social upheaval and political threat like the present, this presumed
durability has value, and the “deep state” so decried by populists
provides, in a more positive sense, an important brake on destructive
social actions: a “steady state.” It is a great irony that, given this
emphasis on preserving and conserving the best of the past,
institutions have become so distrusted by the political right-wing.
Political scientist Hugh Heclo argues from this normative vision that
we should “think institutionally” and act accordingly – that is, be
aware of those traditions outside ourselves that give life a higher
purpose. This captures the idea of institutional stewardship: that
because they endure, and to ensure their endurance, institutions,
both formal and informal, “represent inheritances of valued purpose
with attendant rules and moral obligations,” providing a normative
grounding for life lived in community (Heclo 2008: 38). In this
respect, then, institutions are vital for social life in and of themselves,
but what leads one to embrace one particularly valued purpose over
another? It is this accepted value and moral purpose that has become
so problematic.
Many institutions are closely aligned with the values of a profession,
with the terms institution and profession often used interchangeably
and with similar goals. In addition to calling for institutional defense,
for example, Snyder includes as one of his cautions against creeping
authoritarianism that we “Remember professional ethics. When
political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments
to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-
of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges”
(2017: 38). Professional communities provide important spaces
where ethical conduct can be debated and proper outcomes
discerned. Heclo directly connects his aspirational view of the
institution with this normative idea of profession, in the sense that
it’s a “calling,” that the “professional embodies a deeply held sense of
responding to the call of worthwhile purposes beyond oneself”
(2008: 134). Professional conduct is principled conduct, beyond just
proper expert and technocratic procedure. This kind of thinking,
even if expressed in terms of ideal types, puts greater emphasis on
the valued element in Huntington’s definition of institutions as
“stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior.” Here again, going
beyond Heclo’s sunny approval, we might ask how institutions live
up to their valued purpose and why some are more valued than
others. What would a healthy institution look like? The extent to
which institutions have earned their moral authority, however,
receives relatively less attention from academic observers, given their
more functional focus on how things work – involving the practical
issues of professional problem-solving, adaptation around the
organizational edges, and self-preservation by institutional
members.
But what of the institution of the press, specifically? Although many
have tried, journalism is notoriously difficult to define, and so it’s no
wonder that the larger institution of journalism is as well. Elsewhere
I have ventured that “Journalism seeks to observe and communicate
what it learns of social importance, something called news, and in
doing so is always in the process of creating a public by bringing it
into synchronized conversation with itself” (Reese 2016b). Other
accounts, such as Perloff’s (2020) The Dynamics of News, start with
the end product, by attempting to define something as “the news.”
His definition of news emphasizes how it constructs a narrative
about current issues of public importance, with journalism being the
craft involved in that construction, one based on truthful verification.
Although he stipulates the fragmented nature of news and its many
determinants, posing questions from this starting place suggests that
“we’ll know it when we see it.” Boydstun (2013) takes a similar
approach in her Making the News, which in explaining different
patterns of coverage by “the media,” devotes only one chapter in nine
to “institutional mechanisms.”
Regarding the news product, historian Michael Stephens defines
journalism as relating “new information about a subject of some
public interest that is shared with some portion of the public” (1988:
xii), an expansive definition that hardly helps distinguish between
institutional producers, citizen journalists, and counter-institutional
trolls. At the cultural level, journalism is considered a relatively
autonomous, diffused social practice, which according to Ostertag is
“defined by the goals of the individual who undertakes it” (2016:
266). Others connect journalism more explicitly to its political
function. McChesney and Pickard (2014), for example, define that
entity in society that produces news, that is, the news media, as a
political institution, which gains institutional status by virtue of its
constitutional protection and importance as a “public good.” But
little other definitional clarity is given beyond that; a news institution
is an institution that produces news. Indeed, although its freedom
has been enshrined in the First Amendment, the American press has
never been defined formally by the courts. Of course, at some level
there is an intuitively obvious social practice we call journalism, and
to the extent that practitioners declare themselves journalists and
others grant them that classification, they take on, for all practical
purposes, institutional status.
An explicit version of the concept refers to formally designated
institutions: the courts, for example, or the military. If Capitol Hill
provides a visually iconic stand-in for Congress, the press is
represented by the traditional newsroom – a visible and more easily
observed research site that has characterized much of the field.
Indeed, media research from a variety of perspectives has treated the
institution as a given, equating it unproblematically with familiar
media forms. But the concept of journalism, and the institution we
equate with it, can become a reification, masking the underlying
shifts in the eco-system. To the extent that news has historically been
commercially supported, for example, the institution has become
equated with traditional news media industries. In spite of major
transformations, even those studies describing larger media systems
have primarily dealt with established news media. And it’s natural
that comparative media research has chosen to focus on more easily
defined comparable systems, centered around the news business and
media organizations (e.g., De Vreese, Esser, and Hopmann 2016;
Nielsen 2016). For these reasons, the nature of the institution itself is
not directly addressed in these approaches.
Returning to the challenge of defining the institutional press, one
can see how different aspects have been singled out for emphasis. In
his encyclopedia review of “Journalism as an institution,” for
example, Vos (2019) doesn’t specify what qualifies as journalism, but
whatever it is becomes an institution “inasmuch as it is constituted
by shared beliefs and norms, informal rules and routines, and
explicit rules” (Para 1). This structure is further identified with a
“distinct area of social authority” taking on a certain autonomy from,
yet inter-related with, other institutions. To this definition Vos adds
“explicit norms,” meaning that journalists behave institutionally
when bound together with shared moral commitments. Thus,
recalling Huntington’s definition of “stable, valued, recurring
patterns of behavior,” the journalism institution is a stable social
structure, and remains stable as long as its members believe certain
ways of behaving are useful to solve problems and meet social needs
– as long as they are seen to serve a larger moral purpose. That
general definition still leaves much room for variation, but it does
point out the distinction between what is stable and what is valued,
even though these can seem tautological. Some practices are stable
but no longer valued; others are valued but no longer stable. Many
have remained constant, while others have changed dramatically,
along with new media, platforms, styles, and forms of distribution.
Institutions are stable by definition, and this by itself is a virtue, in
providing continuity, predictability, and confidence. But stability
alone is not sufficient to lay claim to public support and full
institutionality, and a focus on practices has directed attention away
from important institutional-level questions. How much are these
practices really valued, what expectations do we have of journalism
for society, and how well do the structures and the normative beliefs
that constitute the institution line up with larger moral
commitments? Journalism must be continually in the process of
defending those norms and seeking to legitimate its work. Thus, an
attack on its legitimacy is an attack on its very institutionality.

Taking the institution for granted

The communication field has had a largely implicit and unspecified
theory of the institution, with the media system undergirding it often
taken for granted. Although the industry is facing economic
challenges, academic observers have not talked of a crisis, in part
because the institution has simply not been a key focus of study,
much less concerns about its relative health and durability.
Consistent with the media audience and effects tradition, many
studies have asked respondents how often, for example, they
consume “news” and engage in other news-related behaviors. From
there, established models of audience behaviors connect those
behaviors with measures of civic participation, perhaps with
intervening measures of how often news is discussed with others.
This leads to familiar and well-accepted findings that news
consumption is a pro-social behavior with virtuous outcomes, and
that people are demonstrably more engaged politically when they
pay attention to news. This outcome, however, may easily be seen as
just another manifestation of citizen engagement. News in these
models becomes an undifferentiated commodity, and the institution
that produced it rendered invisible. The news literacy movement
more broadly has also taken an audience-centered view, with
educational initiatives promoting such things as “news engagement
day,” sponsored by the Association for Education in Journalism and
Mass Communication, which encourages young people to pay
attention to news and understand its value.1 That type of project is
irresistible to journalism educators, familiar as they are with low-
information students in their classes, but again tends to advance a
view of news as a self-evident and unalloyed social good, regardless
of its current status and institutional future.
The way we perceive and experience news can also shape an implicit
view of the institution. In some respects, from the vantage point of
the audience, there indeed has never been better or more widely
available access to news. Certainly, news users may understandably
assume a media of abundance from the multiplicity of online news
apps and satellite channels, and conclude that there is no cause for
concern. Hermida’s (2010) notion of “ambient journalism” suggests
that news simply “finds us” through one means or another,
particularly through social media. But this is a phenomenological
description of how the news experience feels to us, how we
experience journalism coming to us in everyday life. It doesn’t do
much to specify the institutional supply chain that drives it, nor draw
attention to its status. If news finds us no matter what, then there’s
nothing much called for in reforming the media system. And a user-
centered emphasis on the ambient nature of news fails to
meaningfully differentiate among the many inputs into the news
arena that contribute to that perception – it’s all simply “the news.”
Some observers have drawn optimistic conclusions from this user-
side experience. The director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of
Journalism, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, argues, for example, that in many
respects the world of news has never been better, and that the
journalistic institution has proven to be robust in spite of the global
crackdown on it (Nielsen and Selva 2019). Digital platforms do
promote a sense of a healthy system by making this undifferentiated
news commodity easily available in technologically enabled
unlimited volume. I would argue, however, that the supply-side
shows a different picture, that of a two-tier and hollowed-out
investigative capacity that varies widely by community and country,
with obvious deficits in the resources available to perform
journalism’s traditional watchdog accountability function. Many
parts of the United States – even including large metro areas like
Denver, and joined by others all the time – have become local news
deserts, with little left of the statehouse reporting that was once a
staple of the shrunken daily newspapers in those areas (e.g., Napoli
et al. 2017). The information available to readers for free is either
from large national news organizations that continue to have
workable business models, or is of low quality, duplicative, and
superficial. So, for a number of reasons, academic research has not
responded to the problem of the institution in such a way that the
current state of affairs would require.

The “culturalists” and tribalism

Other perspectives draw attention away from the institution more
explicitly, while overselling its stability and internal coherence by
rooting it in the deep structures of culture. This cultural perspective
has taken hold in recent years, but while providing a compelling
rationale for considering the larger social milieu it reduces
journalism to nothing more than a natural manifestation of culture,
causing institutional concerns to recede into the background.
Cultural sociologists take the position that journalism reflects deep
cultural commitments, autonomous from institutions, that will
ensure its survival. Jeffrey Alexander, for example, regards culture as
the “dark matter” of the social universe, “invisible but exercising
extraordinary power” (2016: 22–3), leading him to take an optimistic
view of the current crisis. But in this discussion the institution itself
– whether constituted by practices, profession, or industry – is
underspecified. Journalism is said to be “pushing back,” with the
internet allowing “news judgments to be projected in widening
spirals that compel responses from other institutions, shaping public
opinion, and shaking up the powers that be” (22). Treating culture as
the fixed pole, Alexander argues that the “crisis of journalism” is not
driven by economic or technological determinism, which “the
cultural power of the profession resists” (23). These forces, rather,
are said to help journalism better adapt to its “cultural
commitments” rather than undermine them.
In Alexander’s edited volume showcasing this approach, Ostertag
takes a similarly sanguine view, arguing that the resilient “social
practice of journalism will endure”: cultural meanings are
transmitted through “dominant institutions … but cannot be reduced
to them” (2016: 265). But what if the institution itself is at risk? In
the same volume, Breese and Luengo conclude that even if delivery
models change “a journalistic sphere that abandons the values and
standards of professional journalism is unimaginable” (2016: 289).
Eliding the professional and institutional dimensions of journalism,
Alexander agrees: “The more central a profession to a society’s core
beliefs and institutions, the more its existential struggles generate
defense and support” (2016: 23). This benign perspective thus
implies a high degree of institutional stability and coherence, given
that the institution is assumed to be a manifestation of culture and
works to transmit it. Yes, at minimum people will continue to share
information, as some form of news, and the Trump presidency has
stimulated renewed subscriber support for elite news organizations
(which could be interpreted as part of the “push-back”), but parts of
that deep cultural structure have been degraded, thereby
undermining stability and fragmenting institutional coherence.
This is where Alexander’s strong culture program comes up short, by
assuming a democratic solidarity based on universal values and basic
cultural commitments. This ahistorical view treats culture as a given,
a unifying and stabilizing force that constrains partisanship and
keeps it in check. If indeed there are certain universal cultural codes,
and journalism is merely an expression of them, the institution itself
becomes naturally less problematic. But the tribal has fractured the
civil sphere, assumed by Alexander to be predicated on disinterested
reporting institutions. In the post-truth moment, journalism’s
empirical epistemology is at odds with the rise of a hyper-
partisanship rooted in a culture of tribalism. Trump’s performance of
what his followers regard as authenticity exemplifies this tribalism,
which challenges journalism’s claim to evidence-based legitimacy. In
his diagnosis of this challenge to the civil sphere, Kreiss (2016)
argues that cultural structures are more fragile and contingent than
Alexander assumes and, if not rendered obsolete, are at least in
serious disarray. When a civic solidarity no longer applies,
partisanship leads to tribalism, confronting journalism as a civil
institution with an existential threat.
Graves takes his extensive work on fact-checking as a professional
movement to further illustrate this point, showing how public facts
“depend on institutional coherence – on exchange governed by
norms of civility and reasonableness and drawing on a common
range of trusted institutional authorities” (2017: 1248). From his
analysis I would conclude that the expectations Schudson has of
institutional coherence and norms of reasonableness are no longer
reasonable (e.g., Schudson 2014). Yes, his upwardly trending reading
of history argues that public life is more accountable and transparent
in many ways, but that trend depended on the institutional
coherence and consensual norms that are now under assault. Various
public actors, think-tanks, and other advocates can make claims –
which Schudson takes, as a group, to be reasonable arguments – but
what about when the entire basis for traditional claims-making is
rejected? What about when agreement breaks down over the
unwritten rules of appropriate conduct and norms? The optimism of
observers like Alexander and his adherents, predicated on some kind
of enduring underlying social practices and structures, seems
similarly and obviously contradicted by increasing state repression,
populist backlash, partisan echo chambers, weaponized social media,
and disinformation campaigns funded by powerful private interests
and foreign governments.

Fields and institutional perspectives

To better understand the crisis, it seems appropriate to reassess
those perspectives that take a specifically institution-level view. As
an analytical tool, thinking institutionally has been a useful way to
approach media as a crucial actor, to show how embedded norms
and practices across an organizational field vary by story, country,
and historical event. How is it that these practices come to be shared
across individual firms and endure over time? Broadly speaking
there is a variety of institutional-level theoretical perspectives that
have influenced communication research. One branch, following
Pierre Bourdieu, emphasizes the field as a site of struggle, with
different participants in that field aware of and contending with each
other (in their own and adjacent fields) as they play the game at
hand. A more institutionalist perspective emphasizes the common
practices across the field that give it a unitary formation (e.g., Ryfe
and Blach-Orsten 2011). Both traditions understand journalism as an
institutional field in relation to others, with its own unique historical
trajectory and inertia-based resistance to change, given the effort
required to establish it in the first place. Institutionalist and field
theory have strong similarities, with institutionalism emphasizing a
more static, stable view of the journalistic space as it enters into
mutually beneficial relationships and practices that allow it to solve
its needs. While both draw attention to intra- and inter-field
dynamics, one depending on the other, Bourdieu’s idea captures a
more dynamic struggle, as one field tries to assert its autonomy by
differentiating itself from others, and where members seek to
privilege their various forms of economic and cultural capital
alignments as needed – a process not highlighted by institutionalists.
Drawing on the work of Powell and DiMaggio (1981), mentioned
above, the institutionalist perspective presents the news as an
empirical question, asking to what extent the media function as an
institution. Political scientists discovered the news media as a
specifically political institution some twenty years ago, giving greater
weight to the press as a unitary political actor. Among the most
prominent exponents of this new institutionalism perspective in
political science have been Sparrow (1999) and Cook (1998), with
books coming out around the same time, arguing that the media,
taken for granted and neglected in much of the field’s theorizing,
should be regarded as an institutional actor. In supporting this claim,
they consider how media all confront uncertainties in the larger
trans-organizational field: uncertainties of access to information,
legitimacy, and making money. These endure over time and are
shared across individual firms, which take steps to ensure their
survival, practices that observed from the outside appear to be
homogeneous. When, for example, the list of authoritative sources
and narrative news frames looks largely the same across
organizations, that can be interpreted as a function of being part of
the same institution. The idea that media are consequential in the
political process may not have been a controversial one in media
studies, where it is a basic premise, but it helped explain how the
press showed such regularities across news organizations in the way
they interacted with the political institution. Institutions, in this
view, endure and, as they endure, grow stronger. Institutionalism
emphasizes stability and continuity, treating shocks to that
equilibrium as exceptions to the rule. Change, from this perspective,
obviously does occur, but it does so by incorporating new
adaptations into existing rules and reimagining what the institution
is for. We don’t, however, get much guidance in understanding what
factors contribute to its decline or destruction.
Sparrow’s institutional view is stacked across conceptual levels,
building on the established rules within organizations to their links
through the larger decision-making hierarchy, to create at a more
macro level an institution that engages with others and becomes a
distinctive and consequential political actor – a powerful force to
which others must react. Institutional actors contend for resources,
struggle over professional jurisdiction, and seek to legitimate their
work. As Sparrow puts it:
the media clearly are an institution in the sense of being a crucial
political and governmental actor, an institution in the sense of
being an ordered aggregate of shared norms and informal rules
that guide news collection, and an institution in the sense of firms
in more or less the same industry and with the same economic,
professional, and informational concerns that inculcate a
distinctive form of political culture. (2006: 155)
In bundling a variety of organizations together analytically into an
institution we can better see how they are consequential – as the
Press, or the Fourth Estate – in providing a stable, predictable, and
agreed-upon framework through which actions are taken and
decisions made. Journalism at its high-water mark, or what Hallin
(1992) calls the “high modernism” Watergate period, reveled in its
institutional role as a co-governing entity. The problem, however,
with that institutional alliance and correlated professional
“insiderism” was made visible at what may have been the low-water
mark in the aftermath of 9/11, with media cheerleading the run-up to
the war in Iraq, while failing to adequately challenge the Bush
administration’s predictions of finding weapons of mass destruction
in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Today, that unstated co-governing
alliance has been clearly undermined by the many normative
disruptions of Trump, most obviously in his bypassing the
professional media altogether. The once-routine White House
briefings visibly put on display an assembled and credentialed press
corps, but that has been replaced with a presidential social media
channel, regular live political rallies, and select interviews with
favored partisan news outlets. The press may still be a consequential
actor in politics, but Sparrow’s “ordered aggregate of shared norms”
has been greatly disrupted.
Selecting the big media for investigation indirectly favored the
institutional hypothesis, an approach that seemed more applicable
when media were more homogeneous, as arguably they were in the
late twentieth century, particularly in the political arena. Campaign
studies are full of examples of pack reporting and group-think among
journalists, as they solved the problem of uncertainty for themselves
by following each other’s lead, and in doing so formed a
consequential institution that could make or break a candidate.
Richard Ben Cramer’s (1992) classic book on the 1988 US
presidential candidates, What it Takes, vividly showed how Gary
Hart was judged by the press as disqualified due to his relationships
with women, in spite of his innovative policy expertise, while George
H. W. Bush was branded in the media as a “wimp,” although his
status as a war hero clearly suggested otherwise. Once the media’s
institutional verdict coalesced, a candidate faced an uphill battle to
overturn it. While this could be interpreted as a form of bandwagon
professional consensus at the routine level of newswork, it was also a
result of the press corps all playing the same institutional game.
Outside of political communication research, the institutionalist
perspective has in general been used by those looking more
specifically at journalism. This leads naturally to asking how
journalism forms relationships of mutual interdependence with
other power centers. Defined through its engagement with other
institutions, they in turn become invested in journalism being the
way it is and adapt to it. Ryfe argues that the “constitutive rules of
journalism are rooted in broader constitutive commitments of public
life” (2017: 12), so we need to take those broader interdependencies
into account. Research has examined newswork with ground-level
ethnography, emphasizing those practices that have become
institutionalized and resistant to change – coming from, for
example, new technologies. This perspective emphasizes
journalism’s historical and path-dependent quality and suggests that
the institution may forego needed innovation, as a number of studies
have shown. As a major exponent, Ryfe, for example, uses an
institutionalist approach to explain why “identities and rules
associated with news production persist” (2017: 2) even in the face of
great technological change, observing that in the face of the digital
“transformation” the news institution has been remarkably durable.
In this more implicit, structural approach, the institution is not
simply composed of the sum of traditional news organizations
working in unison (as in Sparrow’s idea of institutional
homogeneity), but by agreement among the participants on the
unstated rules: how to behave and what to do. These rules bind the
participants together in organized action around shared beliefs.
Status and success accrue to those who exemplify the rules, social
sediment accumulates, and a community arises that shares and helps
reinforce proper professional behavior.
The institutionalist perspective has drawbacks, however, when it
comes to understanding the current crisis. It explains social stability
with a status quo bias, projecting an institution that is by definition
resistant to change, which can overemphasize the durability and
internal coherence of the institutional structure. That is, institutions
in this view tend to remain in place, unless confronted by a shock to
the system; they endure until they don’t, remain stable until they
aren’t. But in a more complex and turbulent media system, to what
extent does this idea overstate the resilience of journalism and
underestimate the dangers of institutional destruction? The status
quo is now up for grabs, with deeply embedded democratic norms,
long thought to be sacrosanct, cast aside. There is also the effect of
an ethnographic vantage point. The institutionalist work in
journalism studies by Ryfe (2012) and others has operated from a
vantage point within the profession and newsroom, looking from the
inside out, from those components of the media system already
playing by the (once) accepted rules. From there it’s easy to conclude
that journalism has largely retained its practices in spite of
technological upheaval. Starting from a shrinking number of
traditional news organizations this view works backwards,
identifying the declining number of institutional survivors and
making inferences about what contributed to their success. Thus, I
would suggest, a focus only on those existing well-ordered practices
overstates institutional durability.

Institutional boundary work

As indicated above, thinking institutionally means understanding the
inter-relationships of journalism with other fields, but that has been
challenged by the shifting terrain occupied by these fields, which
makes a basic task more difficult – clearly defining their boundaries.
Where does one field end and another begin? The political
institution, in particular, has become more enmeshed with parts of
the media field, eroding clear boundaries. Political operatives have
often shifted between roles in campaigns or as media pundits, or
even as television news anchors, and partisan groups have more
frequently been granted press credentials for covering official
proceedings. For many years, these contested boundaries have been
an important issue for the study of journalistic professionalism,
prompted by the erosion of exclusive authority over the news
gatekeeping role. So, is it a professional or an institutional boundary
being encroached on by the many new entrants into a diverse field?
These questions about profession and institution parallel each other
and provide different levels of insight into the same issue, with the
two concepts often used interchangeably. It’s worth sorting them out.
Institutions include stable configurations of professionals and their
expertise, but although they are closely related institutional values do
not necessarily equal professional values (e.g., objectivity). The
institution is bigger than any one profession, and its values are
defined from a larger vantage point. Professionals participate in
institutions, deriving their identity at the individual level from the
larger institution, and they in turn help shape institutional values.
But professionals can also be individuals with a vested interest in
their self-identity, apart from the institution, seeking success on their
own terms as they negotiate their way through an organizational
environment, while they guard their prerogatives and attempt to
distinguish themselves from non-professionals. Multiple professions
can be housed inside an institution, and members may follow
professional allegiances that don’t line up exactly with the
institution’s. The military, for example, employs lawyers and doctors,
who may find themselves on conflicted ethical terrain in balancing
professional and institutional constraints – such as the conflict
within the second Bush administration over defining torture as
“enhanced interrogation.” The same doctors and lawyers may even
be found running their own practices, without intersecting as
formally with larger institutional frameworks.
Profession is a term that has been and still is problematic for
journalism, which has been thought of as a profession, even if it
doesn’t meet the traditional criteria. It has no credentialing process
for membership, but it involves a call to public service and a concern
over ethical practice (Reese and Cohen 2000). More traditional
professions, such as medicine and law, grant the practitioner
considerably more autonomy in making decisions, and they
emphasize a base of original knowledge brought to bear on real-
world problems. Journalism, where practitioners have far less
autonomy, is different from these other areas in merging the roles of
professional, organizational employee, and institutional member. As
a result, the profession has often been equated with the industry it
serves, with journalism schools providing the vocational skills
demanded by the news industry – taught mostly at undergraduate
level (unlike other professional schools) to aspiring entry-level
employees (Reese 1999). The boundary issues posed for both
institution and profession therefore tend to line up more closely in
the case of journalism – causing the frequent blurring of these
concepts.
Regarding this contested professional status, journalism research
has treated the contestation itself as the feature of greatest interest.
If there is no official boundary around the profession, how is it
established and given a meaningful function? The familiar question
of “who is a journalist?” has kept this issue of professionalism and
boundaries on the table, which in journalism studies has been
approached with two different major strategies. One of them, with a
long tradition, emphasizes the study of professional roles, starting
with a pre-defined institution and proceeding to interrogate
journalists about their shifting role conceptions as they experience
professional changes and external challenges (Weaver and Wilhoit
1991; Hanitzsch et al. 2011; Willnat and Weaver 2014). This tradition
takes its sample from the shrinking number of professional
journalists employed in traditional news organizations, giving it a
less problematic institutional definition as a starting point. Other
studies have adopted a different strategy and not been willing to
stipulate those boundaries in advance, posing the question instead as
a matter of social adaptation and meaning-making. Professional
values and norms are treated not as authentic and deeply felt
aspirations but as sociological markers of jurisdictional disputes
(something I’ll return to in the last chapter). In the absence of
credentialing and other clear criteria, this approach treats the
profession as an interpretive community, which communicates
among itself in discourse and collective interpretations to enforce a
sense of membership (Zelizer 1997). Community members cover
events, then talk about how they covered them in building and
enforcing community norms. Hanitzsch and Vos (2017) invoke this
“discursive turn” in a closely related institutional direction,
proposing journalism as a discursive institution, constructed by
journalists through the way they think about their roles and
professional boundaries and assign them meaning. The principled
correctness of professional behavior is irrelevant to whether it serves
to provide interpretive coherence for community members, as they
try to make sense of what they do. But these discursive approaches
still must, in some occupational sense, start with those pre-defined
journalists and news organizations.
The idea of boundary work draws more attention to active
contestation with adjacent fields (e.g., Carlson and Lewis 2015).
Journalists resist encroachment on their prerogatives, sometimes
expanding and sometimes expelling, as they police their lines of
authority. This idea reinforces the notion that setting and
maintaining boundaries takes work, but it’s primarily work done by
the beneficiary of how those boundaries are ultimately drawn. My
own use of the concept of paradigm repair implies a more stable
ideological space, an enduring model for how journalism should be
done. Violations of paradigmatic assumptions, or anomalies, must be
repaired in order to preserve the viability of the model as an
accepted guide to professional practice (Reese 1990). This boundary
work perspective, however, can also draw attention to boundary
crossings, as Carlson and Lewis (2015) point out, which requires
shifting focus from a community of individuals (i.e., journalists), who
are similarly invested in guarding their jurisdiction, to a group of
networked relationships or assemblages, reacting to each other in the
process of news production. In such a networked news space,
participants can still display a commitment to certain institutional
values in spite of their location outside the traditional profession or
main field of activity. Ananny and Crawford (2015), for example, in
their study of news app designers for mobile platforms, found these
workers didn’t profess to be journalists, and yet they valued the
norm of transparency, seeking to let readers know how news
recommendations were being made with clear attribution to the
underlying source. Boundary work was still taking place, if in a less
traditional form, as these interstitial designers located their work in
the larger field.
Thinking in terms of boundaries tends to overemphasize the
defensive work carried out by traditional configurations of legacy
media, a reactionary effort of the field, institution, and profession to
repel invaders and engage in rituals of self-justification. This
negative sense of boundary work is seen in the paradigmatic repair
referred to earlier and carries a more critical ideological sense. A
challenge to the status quo is explained away and the threat
neutralized, so as to exert hegemonic control. To repair a paradigm
suggests an attempt to patch up a badly outdated machine rather
than pursue a broader, sincerely motivated overhaul. Graves and
Konieczna (2015) point out, however, that there can be more positive
forms of repair – for example, finding a deficit within journalism and
filling it. The desire to make this kind of field repair, in their analysis,
helps account for the relaxation of competitive practice and the more
visible embrace of journalistic collaboration, in both investigative
projects and their distribution. These collaborations, including the
fact-checking movement itself, are dedicated to improving the
practice of journalism and its mission. They are repairs directed at
what I would regard as the field’s institutional center, the
accountability journalism that is essential for performing its role
relative to other institutions, and that reflects its greatest degree of
independence. Thus, this positive-repair perspective targets
something beyond a matter of narrow professional jurisdiction, to
address the larger institutional performance on behalf of society.
In this sense, the institution is not static, but adapts in positive ways,
guided by norms of responsibility and transparency. In a period of
information abundance and eroded gatekeeping control, that
requires absorbing new practices in the service of old values. Some of
these new forms may be regarded as non-institutional to the extent
they emerge outside the traditional organizational confines of
professional practice, but they become institutional when integrated
and settled, partly through the leadership of more established
organizations. In what they call an example of “institutional
adaptation and renewal,” Chadwick and Collister (2014) examined
the work of the Guardian in reporting Edward Snowden’s massive
classified document leak from the National Security Agency in 2013.
As a strategic, more purposeful approach to the institution
reasserting its power, as exemplified by this venerable news
organization, new techniques from the digital environment are
adopted in a process the authors call “boundary-drawing,” exploiting
new hybrid forms – such as live-blogging, creative use of Twitter,
and hosting a live webchat with Snowden – to reassert authority and
extend the limits of professional practice. The Guardian, from this
perspective, was not just mindlessly defending its professional
prerogatives but was promoting institutional values through its
reporting within the core realm of investigative journalism,
“revitalizing and reinventing professional investigative journalism”
(Chadwick and Collister 2014: 2434).
Levels of analysis
As this brief review indicates, an institutionalism perspective based
on well-defined organizational boundaries clearly needs to be
revisited. The slippery concept of the institution, even in more stable
times, involved diverse approaches and terms, so to better classify
these perspectives I broadly summarize them based on level of
analysis. In my own media sociology approach, I have regarded the
institution as one level among others, in an ordered hierarchy of
influences, sorting the influences on the news ranging from micro to
macro, from an individual, professional level to the routine and
media organizational levels, extending next to the institutional level,
and followed ultimately by the social system level (e.g., Reese and
Shoemaker 2016). Thus, in this formulation the institution lies
somewhere between the organization and the social system, a
position that captures more than specific organizations (containing
the various professional roles, internal hierarchies, financial
operations, and policies) and considers instead how they combine
into a larger trans-organizational field. In some ways, however, this
oversimplifies the picture, because even this institutional level has
been approached from different methodological perspectives –
suggesting that we can further divide this level into a macro-
institutional and a micro-institutional level. This further distinction
in the hierarchy of influences, then, is based largely on a matter of
emphasis, divided into what I will call a macro-structural (aka meso,
or inter-organizational) and a micro-practice institutional level.
Research at both levels treats institutions as a larger complex
structure, transcending individuals and their organizations, but
reflects different methodological and theoretical choices.
Macro-level analyses provide a 30,000-foot level view of the
institution, typified by the many comparative studies of media
systems, field theory analysis, and even more historical analysis by,
for example, Schudson (2010). At this level the institution as a whole
can be compared with those in other national contexts (e.g., Benson
2013), but in order to compare systems, typically across countries,
the internal institutional structure is naturally de-emphasized and
flattened. The institutionalist work of Sparrow and Cook, for
example, takes a largely macro view, in the sense that they examine
the media as a political actor, and in its relationships with other
social institutions (political, legal, etc.). Those institutionalist studies
conducted at the micro-practice level, on the other hand, typically
gather their evidence internal to the newsroom, through close
observation and fieldwork (Ryfe 2006, 2012). This means looking,
often ethnographically, at what journalists do, finding recurring
behaviors at the level of practice within the shrinking traditional
newsroom culture. These studies describe the internal rules of
behavior and relationships on which the institution is predicated,
and the roles and identities that ensure its durability (e.g.,
normalizing technology by integrating it into existing routines).
Using these categories, based on level of analysis, I will return in
Chapter 5 to expand these perspectives in order to account for a
larger hybrid institution.

Conclusion
As this review shows, institutional studies carry with them a number
of assumptions about journalism’s internal coherence and unitary
character. Audience-centered research does this implicitly by not
addressing the institutional supply-side, or measuring its variety of
forms, rendering news as an unproblematic (or at least
unconcerning) commodity. It clearly no longer makes sense to refer
to media as though it were a single institutional entity, consisting of
all the organizations involved in journalism. Yet, media research has
tended to reify the media through audience surveys, which has the
effect of overemphasizing a single coherent set of practices. Tsfati
and Cappella (2003), for example, asked respondents about the
“news media in general,” how well “the media” covered the election,
how well they trusted “media organizations” to “report the news
fairly,” and how much confidence respondents had in the people
running the “institutions of the press” – measures that all were
closely related.
Similarly, the cultural perspective of Alexander and colleagues avoids
confronting institutional crisis by rooting journalism in a deeper
cultural structure, thought to ultimately allay any concerns about its
survival. Meanwhile, those studies that have conceptualized the
institution more directly have been rooted in legacy media systems
and ethnographies of traditional newsrooms. While it is helpful to
understand how the press operates as a consequential actor in the
social system, particularly as a political actor, we need to update that
understanding. The boundaries are no longer as self-evident as they
were in the high-modern period, and the institutional field has been
fractured, with its stability no longer assured. Looking at media
systems and comparing them cross-nationally may overlook
emerging alliances and new, globally distributed boundaries.
Similarly, starting with traditional news organizations to observe
their adaptation overstates institutional stability and makes it more
difficult to see the emerging configurations and assemblages that
contribute to the institutional field. Instead, we should rather
consider various practices to determine what makes them
journalistic. The classification in terms of levels of analysis
introduced above is a good place to start sorting out prior work, but,
as I will point out in the next chapters, another perspective is needed
to better account for these different assumptions beyond traditional
journalism practice and newsroom fieldwork. I will return to this
issue in Chapter 5, to identify those structures that are beyond
professional and organizational yet have a bearing on the hybrid
institution.
In the social system theorizing of Talcott Parsons (1951), mentioned
earlier, the institution is regarded as a social structure with strategic
significance, formed of a stable number of interlocking roles. In his
biting critique of this style of grand theorizing, however, C. Wright
Mills (1959) argued that it emphasizes a set of relations that are in
some sort of harmonic balance, a functional state of affairs based on
the stable expectations of the participants. This takes for granted the
whole normative framework in which they reside and leaves little
room for the workings of power in their engagement with larger
economic and political forces. This critique still has relevance for
more contemporary institutional analysis. Now, as then, by
legitimating “stable forms of domination” (Mills 1959: 49), this kind
of Parsonian analysis (which anticipates Alexander’s sense that
culture just is) makes it difficult to imagine the existential threat, and
to account for how the institution may come to collapse or be
captured, having been corrupted and hollowed out from the inside.
Part of this analytical challenge means being more explicitly
normative, and linking institutions to a larger moral purpose.
Institutional adaptation and self-preservation have failed to win full
legitimation from the larger society. So, in considering journalism as
an increasingly unstable social structure, we might better ask what
makes this complex social structure valued, both by its members and
by the public it serves. Drawing from my previous definition, we
need to better explain how the “network of rules and activities, roles,
technologies, norms, and collective frames of meaning” that
constitute the institution “work together to sustain its coherence,
endurance, and value.” This is the kind of moral narrative that social
science research has found uncomfortable, preferring to stick with a
more dispassionate analytical stance. For example, much of the
analysis of professionals within organizations noted earlier has
regarded norms as tactical tools, as resources to be deployed
defensively at the boundaries of the field. Professionals practice
objectivity in this sense, not because they necessarily believed in it
from the start, but because it gives them a practical and routinized
way to defend themselves from attack (Tuchman 1972). Norms in
this sense are invoked, rather than sincerely believed, markers of
professional prowess and personal self-defense, rather than derived
from a moral stance. Indeed, the whole idea of norms and standards
in much of the newsroom sociology literature takes on the
appearance of a cynical ploy at self-preservation – even if not always
successful. Undoubtedly, journalism was not well served during the
digital revolution when professionals held fast to their jurisdictional
worries at the expense of rapidly adapting to a larger vision of the
roles they were more equipped to fill. The time has come for a
broader normative discussion, based not on the preservation of
professional prerogatives but in the service of institutional survival
and moral purpose. In the next chapter I turn to how the institution
must bear some of the blame for the decline in trust and its own
legitimacy. Even as institutions must be defended, they still must be
critically examined.

Note
1 See http://www.newsengagement.org.
4
The Implicated Institution
Traditional institutions have not always adapted well to globalizing
forces and have sown some of the seeds of their own loss of
authority. Anti-democratic tendencies have corrupted their missions
and created a disconnect with the public they serve, whether the
European Union’s lack of responsiveness to individual citizens, the
US electoral college’s over-representation of rural over urban voters,
or congressional elections and policy-making distorted by large
corporate donations, rendering them less responsive to public
opinion. Elites have manipulated institutions, corrupting them to
their own advantage, causing middle-class citizens especially to lose
confidence – not only in political institutions, but in banking,
religion, higher education, and, of course, media (Hayes 2012). That
has contributed to identity-based reactionary responses, appeals to
xenophobia, a rise in populist energy, and a distrust in traditional
instruments of governance which, when exploited by populist
leaders, leads to further corruption and a weakening of their anti-
authoritarian function.
Against this backdrop of institutional corruption, the practice of
journalism itself has had some well-documented shortcomings,
making the erosion of public trust in many ways understandable and
long overdue. From Carlson’s (2017) perspective, authoritative
journalism is defined as whatever practices and texts people accept
as having a right to their attention. But of course, that begs the
question of what has caused so many to withdraw that acceptance.
The media system and the political climate that feeds it have become
highly polarized, leading people to doubt any account not consistent
with their tribe or prior beliefs, and making the messengers
vulnerable to attack – both political and sometimes physical. Even
fact-checking, a professional movement for resolving disputes with
evidence-based consensus, gets selectively invoked and accused of
bias (Graves 2016). Clearly, major divides have opened up in what
the public regards as attention-worthy, and not entirely without good
reason. To the extent that much of the media system is commercially
driven, the online world has encouraged the worst excesses of
sensationalism in news, exploiting the drive for attention with a race
to the bottom by many outlets. Alternatives to a profit-driven news
media system were never fully explored with any degree of public
engagement in the early days of US media policy deliberations (e.g.,
McChesney 1993). Commercial interests worked against the public
even being fully aware of such alternatives, but the current
dysfunctions and market failure of journalism have created a
dissatisfaction that manifests itself in many ways, including the
embrace of a right-populist, media-bias vocabulary for channeling
that dissatisfaction.
The current drumbeat of threats against the press and the outcry
from defenders imply that, until now, a fully autonomous and
politically adversarial institution had been effective in carrying out
its Fourth Estate role. But, of course, the reality never conformed to
that mythological projection. The institutional boundaries were
always less clearly defined at the ownership and control level than at
the ground level of professional practice, where journalists at least
made some semblance of avoiding conflicts of interest, to the point of
avoiding involvement in political activism, or in some cases even
voting. Large corporate media firms, on the other hand, often have
other holdings, with natural conflicts of interest arising when
journalists cover other parts of the company. Firms do compete, but
mutual dependencies between media and large concentrations of
wealth are built into the system, as revealed in the patterns of
interlocking directorates among corporate boards. These firms lobby
political officials for favorable regulatory treatment, and the giant
platform companies have become a significant source of multi-party
campaign funding. The press has engaged more directly with other
institutions than with the public it is intended to serve. The
coordination of class interests is facilitated by the circulation of elites
across media, political, and other major sectors of society, through
common schooling, private clubs, and participation in high-level
think-tanks and other gathering spots, such as the World Economic
Forum at Davos – a focus of research by political sociologists like
Domhoff (1979) and others. Applying this perspective to a study of
the network structure of news sources on television reveals a similar
concentration reflecting this elite circulation (Reese, Grant, and
Danielian 1994). Although I will not be able to do justice here to the
extensive research behind these critiques, these issues need to be
acknowledged in understanding how institutions have stumbled and
left themselves open to attacks, some based on nihilistic trolling but
others rooted in legitimate grievances. In this chapter I want to
consider some of the ways in which the institutional press itself,
particularly the commercial media system on which much of it is
based, must face up to its role in precipitating the current crisis and
its own loss of authority as a result.

Institutional shortcomings
Critiques of news media have a long tradition, and big media have
provided a big target for academic research. Media literacy education
early on sought to expose the interests working behind the scenes,
building on exposés like Vance Packard’s 1957 book, The Hidden
Persuaders, looking at the advertising industry. And with the growth
of television and its centrality in modern life, cautionary messages
became more frequent that media were not always a benign societal
presence. More systematic investigations in communication research
began to document concerns about television violence and the
distorted world being communicated, especially to children. The
national news media received a strong indictment with the 1968
release of the report from the Kerner Commission, appointed by
President Johnson to review the causes of urban and racial unrest.
Famously warning of the United States moving toward “separate and
unequal” worlds of black and white, the report blamed white
institutions, including the media, saying, “The press has too long
basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s
eyes and white perspective.” Since then, a long line of media research
has mapped the patterns of (mis)representation around the coverage
of race, but also issues of gender, class, occupation, sexuality,
geography, and nation. Pointing out these misrepresentations of the
“real world” helped create greater awareness and a better
understanding of the problem, but didn’t necessarily lead to
significant institutional reform. Research studies that mapped the
media world carried implicit theories about how representation
should be – more like the real world and fairer toward disadvantaged
groups – but didn’t have much reform-producing teeth. And there
was usually little engagement by the producers of these reports with
the news profession, which was unlikely to pay much attention to
such research in any case (or to academia in general). Newsrooms
have worked, for example, to improve diversity in hiring and
promotion, but a strong First Amendment ethos in the profession
helped fend off any major shifts in government media policy, such as
introducing any serious form of public financing or imposing
restrictions on concentrations of ownership, comparable to those in
Europe.
Academic media critique has taken a number of perspectives. In its
most radical form, critical theory embraced the study of ideology,
regarded as, in John Thompson’s (1990) definition, “meaning in the
service of power.” In this sense, ideology is treated as a societal
dynamic, implicitly shared and not to be confused with individual-
level belief systems. Classic accounts of media and ideology
emphasized the process of hegemony, in ground-level institutional
investigations, showing how news coverage routinely domesticated
and trivialized dissent (e.g., Gitlin 1980), or otherwise favored vested
interests. Perhaps the strongest indictment argued that the media
“manufacture consent,” as in Herman and Chomsky’s (1988)
Propaganda Model, which through an analysis of a series of cases
depicts the transmission of media material through state and
corporate filters that render it serviceable to the status quo. Here
there’s little room for professional or institutional autonomy – or
sociological nuance. Less radical critics have documented more
specific instances of “when the press failed,” in the title of one
volume (Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston 2007). This failure has
notably included how the elite press and pundit corps failed to
question military policy in the run-up to the US-led war with Iraq,
internalizing the “War on Terror” framing promoted by the Bush
administration (Lewis and Reese 2008; Reese and Lewis 2009). In a
gentler reformist vein, other media scholars have suggested that
journalists should at least be better informed about the issues they
report on (Patterson 2013).
Loss of institutional authority can be traced in part to the profit-
centered business model for journalism, and the product it naturally
yields. The face of US mainstream media is highly commercialized,
especially as exemplified by cable television, which relies on punditry
and staged arguments in lieu of field reporting and analysis (and
that’s just the presumably centrist version, on networks like CNN).
This is the kind of news that draws the attention of a television-
watching American president, who responds with regular attacks on
non-supportive media and other visible targets – via Twitter and by
pointing to the television cameras at political rallies, encouraging the
disdain for the media among his followers. The irony is, of course,
that Trump has been good for media profits, with his news appeal
producing high ratings and online clicks during the extensive and
largely uncritical free coverage he received during the 2016 campaign
– a symbiotic trend that has continued, even if that coverage has
turned more critical. All these media distortions are not imposed on
organizations from the outside but built into the system. Commercial
imperatives help drive sensationalism both in television and print,
often interpreted by the public instead (with pundit-driven
encouragement) as a form of partisan bias. This has been a concern
in a number of national media systems. Tabloid newspapers in the
UK, for example, are among the worst offenders. A significant sector
of the British press – particularly the right-wing partisan newspapers
Daily Mail, Sun, Daily Express, Telegraph, and The Times – waged
a concerted propaganda campaign against Britain’s membership of
the European Union, with a “catalog of distortions, half-truths, and
outright lies,” that outperformed the more responsible reporting on
Brexit in the Guardian and Daily Mirror (Barnett 2016). And this
has continued to have serious dysfunctional consequences.
Chadwick, Vaccari, and O’Loughlin (2018) found, for example, that
during the 2017 UK general election sharing such tabloid-based
stories on Twitter was associated with a greater sharing of
misinformation, while sharing news from other sources (including
RT, the Russian news outlet) did not correlate with this kind of
dysfunctional behavior.
Other blame can be directed squarely at the profession itself.
Journalism has too often been smug and self-satisfied, confusing
trust with the fact that it had a corner on the information market at a
time when advertising revenue was assured. But this monopolistic
position was not necessarily because it was so well loved and
performing so ably (Ladd 2012; Lewis 2020). Unlike more
traditional professions, journalism has not had a tradition of turning
a critical eye inwards. Rather than being based on a depth of
specialized knowledge that members are obliged to master,
journalism has been characterized by an anti-intellectual emphasis
on a “set-of-skills,” to be emulated by apprentice practitioners. In
serving this professional mission, university educators have caught
criticism from both sides: from their colleagues in more traditional
scholarly disciplines, who doubt whether the vocational aspects of
journalism are sufficiently academic; and from the industry, which
has worried that the instruction is not practical enough. Pooley and
Katz (2008) provide a valuable historiography of the communication
field that highlights this vocational bind in seeking disciplinary
respectability within the university. When observers within the
academic world of journalism dared to be critical of a self-reinforcing
and self-congratulatory profession, they were deemed “anti-
professional,” and students were advised by industry figures to take
courses elsewhere on campus from the “real scholars” (Reese 1999).
Reflecting that view, an industry-supported report on journalism
education issued in the late 1990s argued that journalism already
was an intellectual activity and should be better recognized as such
within the academy (Medsger 1996). It appeared to me then that its
declining professional legitimacy spurred the industry to recoup
prestige in the academy, where its foundation-based economic
resources could be translated into cultural capital.1 That kind of
assertive engagement with higher education has become less vocal in
recent years, with fewer industry resources available to challenge the
academy over how a particular set of skills is taught. A disoriented
and less confident profession appears much more willing to seek out
joint ventures, collaborative thinking with academe, and guidance
toward an uncertain future.
Although this is in many ways a good time for institutional stock-
taking and self-evaluation, some in the profession have used the
recent surge in attacks on the press to respond with a more limited
and self-righteous defense – which, one suspects, is unlikely to
persuade many critics. The populist-driven assault on the news
media takes on a more human face when specific journalists are
singled out for criticism. Jim Acosta of CNN, for example, was one of
the more visible administration antagonists and presidential
whipping boys, given his high profile on-camera role as a White
House correspondent, leading eventually to his press credentials
being blocked for a time. He capitalized on this notoriety with a
recent book, The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the
Truth in America (2019). No doubt Acosta has a right to stand up for
himself, but books in this genre have a long tradition of pitting the
crusading journalist against the powers that be, and are presented
with a professional impenetrability. Implicit in the title, of course, is
that Acosta is telling the truth just by virtue of being a journalist, that
there are no structural biases in the news system, and that CNN
bears no culpability in the decline in trust resulting from its often-
sensationalized coverage (especially in its symbiotic relationship
with Trump). A similar book was published about the same time by
one of the most senior White House reporters, April Ryan, entitled
Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White
House (2018). She proposed to tell readers what it’s like when asking
tough questions puts the reporter in the spotlight. Books like these
may help describe what it’s like for journalists on the ground, and
how it feels to be on the receiving end of presidential attacks, but
they don’t do much to rebut public suspicion that high-profile
journalists like them are mainly seeking to burnish their own brand.
To further diagnose the profession’s authority problem, it is helpful
to consider the image journalism presents to itself via a larger
discourse that Carlson (2015) calls meta-journalistic –essentially
journalism-about-journalism. This meta-narrative could be seen on
public display in the form of the profession’s monument to itself, the
Newseum in Washington, D.C., which closed at the end of 2019. The
Newseum served as an educational outreach project, showcasing and
celebrating American journalism, but this project and its declining
fortunes illustrate both the institutionalized character of the news
and its conflicted image. Backing the Newseum was the Freedom
Forum foundation, established in 1991 as a philanthropic extension
of the Gannett newspaper company, although officially independent
of the nation’s once largest chain (now merged with Gatehouse to be
again the largest), and with its large endowment supporting a
declared mission of “free press, free speech and free spirit.” That
mission, in previous years under the Gannett Foundation name, had
aimed to elevate journalism education and sponsor more high-brow
outreach at a media studies center, based at Columbia University in
valuable real estate within the Pulitzer building, which housed the
storied School of Journalism. Leading thinkers at Columbia
interacted via the center with industry professionals and visiting
academic fellows, encouraging a more scholarly engagement with the
industry.2
Later, however, the center was shuttered along with other initiatives
– such as international press freedom programs and support for
former professionals to pursue doctorates qualifying them for
academic jobs – in favor of investing heavily in D.C. real estate, on
which to build a glitzier version of the Foundation’s, until then,
Roslyn, Virginia-based facility (ultimately almost $500 million, all
told). As a high-tech form of industry self-congratulation, the
Newseum opened in its new incarnation in 2008, with a diverse
array of exhibits, ranging from a fragment of the World Trade Center
after 9/11 to a section of the Berlin Wall. By then the economic
decline of the industry was already well under way, with the world of
social media opening up new platforms of engagement and
distraction. The displays of quality journalism, such as Pulitzer-
winning photographs and advocacy for First Amendment values,
were important educational contributions in many respects, but the
underlying professional ideology never fully engaged with a deeper,
more critical analysis. News was depicted just as it was, as an
obvious social good, particularly in its Americanized incarnation – a
reliable stream of truth that was ever available and crucial for
society, with little introspection about the underlying tensions in the
commercial form of journalism (from which the foundation had
derived its now shrinking endowment) (Reese 2001). The
Newseum’s select group of well-paid executives, mostly former
newspaper leaders, kept the focus well within the mainstream
discourse, although it still was appreciated by educators for
providing valuable historical and digital resources for the classroom.
Still, the Newseum wanted to have it both ways, to both be in on the
joke of journalism in the larger culture while standing up to the
political threat. In 2018, the giftshop inexplicably began carrying
Make America Great Again hats and T-shirts sporting a “fake news”
slogan, before withdrawing them after receiving a barrage of
criticism.
The presence of the Newseum on the capital’s museum mall, a short
distance from the Smithsonian, was a physical manifestation of the
institutionalization of journalism, rooted side by side with other
Washington institutions. But the glossy overlay hid the internal
industry rot and the conflicted public view of journalism’s struggles.
Although supported by a non-profit foundation, the pricey tickets
suggested something aspiring to a more profit-generating and pop-
culture related enterprise. Most importantly, I would argue, the
Newseum had the effect of naturalizing the profit-based commercial
model of journalism and reifying a unitary, un-conflicted view of the
institution – housed as it was within a single building and
overarching program. In the curated artifacts and images, news was
given authority by being attached to big events like 9/11 and, to go
with its First Amendment roots, other freedom-related moments,
such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was a way for the profession
to claim for itself a self-evident importance, without the full
supporting argument.3

Conspiracy theories and citizens

Deconstructing the meta-journalistic narrative with cases such as the
Newseum provides some clues about institutional shortcomings
rooted in the professional ideology, but other indicators of these
shortcomings and their consequences can be found in the larger
society. The surge in conspiracy theories has become an inevitable
outgrowth of an internet era in which disinformation abounds. Social
media platforms have grown dramatically, contributing to a parallel
universe of media: blogs, websites, and other forms of self-
reinforcing communication that promote and sustain conspiracy
beliefs.
Some political scientists have argued that conspiracy thinking is
evenly distributed across the political spectrum, but the evidence for
this conclusion was drawn from the early years of social media and,
in some cases, based on questions that are closer to concerns over
political efficacy: e.g., “Even though we live in a democracy, a few
people will always run things anyway” (Uscinski and Parent 2014).
The industrialization of conspiracy theory production and its velocity
via social media has arguably increased since then, as have the more
insidious calls to violence predicated upon them, and this has
introduced a clear asymmetry toward the right-wing (Isaac and
Roose 2018). These beliefs are concerning to the extent that they
point to a decline in traditional rumor-busting institutions and,
although primarily treated as a form of social pathology, they also
serve as a diagnostic of press performance. They take root in the
absence of accepted authority.
Conspiracy theories are troubling for journalism because they
express a deep paranoia that can never be falsified by evidence;
something else will always be introduced, leading to a never-ending
descent down the rabbit hole. United by a common distrust in
government – from JFK assassination theorists, to Obama
“birthers,” and often including anti-Semitic themes – conspiracists
have in common an anxiety about a world out of control, a society
being taken away from those accustomed to having power. So, of
course these views fit easily into a populist outlook and have become
a subject of universal concern.4 Behind these developments amateur
investigations have proliferated. The 9/11 “truther” movement has
deep roots in the larger conspiracy tradition, leading to such wildly
popular, self-produced documentaries as Loose Change. This
investigation, produced on a shoestring budget, dealt with the
science of the explosions that brought down the World Trade Center
towers, and with the economic interests of government figures who
were presumed to benefit from the military action that ensued. As
editor Lev Grossman wrote in Time about that period: “A grand
disaster like September 11 needs a grand conspiracy behind it.”5
Not all conspiracy cultures, however, are equally irrational and
unhinged. Some participants are well meaning, and sincerely think
they are helping bring needed information to light. But this
distinction has been lost in the public discourse that leads to the
exploitation of conspiracy thinking by extremists (and mainstream
pundits), not to mention a president who launched his appeal to
voters with his own form of “birtherism,” questioning the veracity of
President Obama’s birth certificate. Conspiracy culture is no longer a
fringe phenomenon but mainstream, and Trump has exploited it.
And this is where a more conflicted lesson for journalism comes in.
In her ethnography of New York truthers at Ground Zero, near the
former site of the World Trade Center, Laura Jones gives a more
sympathetic portrait of these people, noting that in their work
“patriotism is reclaimed from its cooption into meaning
unconditional support for the ‘war on terror’ and rewritten within a
narrative of patriotic dissent” (2010: 367). They think it their duty to
bring the knowledge they’ve discovered to the attention of the public,
and consider it common-sensical that the government would
willingly lie to the public in order to advance its objectives. And
indeed, this suspicion unfortunately has been proven repeatedly to
have an historical basis. In the words of crusading journalist I. F.
Stone, “All governments lie.” So, according to Jones, dismissing
these claims out of hand as conspiracy theories, as journalists have
tended to do in marginalizing anti-mainstream views, allows the
government to reinforce its dominant narrative and undercut a wider
critique of policy. To the extent that media were willing to help
promote these dominant policy narratives, such as in George W.
Bush’s post-9/11 “War on Terror,” journalism became complicit in
government disinformation, a guardian of the professional
consensus, and a natural target of this kind of growing public
suspicion.
Certainly, conspiracy theories have a long tradition, as a reflection of
what Richard Hofstadter (1952) regarded as a pathological “paranoid
style” in American politics. Political scientists Eric Oliver and
Thomas Wood (2018) show through extensive survey research that
these beliefs are linked to magical thinking, including belief in the
supernatural, and find that this style of thinking is related to what
they term an “intuitionist” approach to politics. This worldview
based on prophecy and myth is contrasted with that of the
“rationalists,” who approach the world on the basis of clear logic and
facts. These categories map onto the political spectrum, with Oliver
deeming modern conservatism to have become a largely intuitionist-
based movement. This asymmetry in political reasoning mirrors the
same qualitative imbalance in how the media eco-system is
structured. It’s not just a matter of equally insulated filter-bubbles on
either side of the political spectrum. Although conspiracy thinking is
not the sole province of any one party, these findings help further
explain why the right is particularly susceptible to intuitionist-based
populism and to conspiracy-peddling – and resistant to debunking
efforts by journalism, in its work as a rationalist enterprise.
Indeed, De Maeyer (2019) argues that we need to take conspiracy
culture seriously, because, after all, conspiracy theorists resemble
journalists in seeking to uncover hidden connections, to speak truth
to power. The impulse to seek conspiracies behind events suggests
there is a desire for something that journalism hasn’t been providing.
Uncovering the larger reality of what’s behind people’s individual
troubles accords with the advice of C. Wright Mills (1959), that the
job of the sociological imagination is to connect private troubles with
public issues. This is the kind of deep analysis carried out, for
example, by Kathy Cramer (2016) on disaffected communities in
Wisconsin, and in Louisiana by Arlie Hochschild (2016). The
significant impact of these two observers on the popular
conversation lies in them taking their subjects seriously in seeking
explanations for populist leanings. That’s something journalism itself
should have been doing and it now bears some responsibility for the
proliferation of would-be journalists in the form of conspiracy
theorists (and investigators). No doubt much conspiracy thinking
should rightfully be dismissed as a misguided effort based on
paranoia, or as a cynical tool for political manipulation and state-
sponsored disinformation, but such thinking can blend into more
sincerely motivated attempts to understand the forces working
behind the scenes. This desire for understanding should be
recognized as a manifestation of something vital that has been
missed by traditional journalism. The institution must be capable of
speaking to both rationalist and intuitionist citizens if these groups
are not to continue simply speaking past each other in completely
different and disconnected conversations.

Elites and experts

The authority of institutions is difficult to disentangle from the
performance of the elites who inhabit them. When social practices
become institutionalized, hierarchies and paths for advancement
develop, as resources cluster around established practices, and
winners gain access to those resources by learning and playing by the
rules of the game. To ensure their self-preservation institutions need
members who embody their values, norms, and practices, those who
occupy the top institutional positions – in short, elites, who guide the
production of expert knowledge that those institutions generate. In
more general terms, they are the ones who have more of what society
has to offer, the ones in charge, the decision-makers. They have the
power to dictate the terms to which others must respond, but as we
have seen they have become fractured and don’t all dictate in the
same direction.
Therefore, to understand journalism’s shortcomings requires coming
to terms with its status as an elite institution. To the extent that there
once was a more clearly identifiable news institution it was easier to
attack it, particularly in finding a key professional leadership class to
blame and hold accountable, but now that target is more widely
distributed (even if the discourse around it has remained largely the
same). Like the institution itself, the idea of elites has been
approached from a number of perspectives. Conservative and liberal
critiques of a so-called “media elite” both provide insight into
understanding institutional failure, and between them suggest real
shortcomings to be addressed. If conservatives regard media elites as
an unaccountable power center, disconnected from mainstream
cultural values, a left line of thinking regards them as just another
wing of the elite class, coordinated in their support of ruling-class
interests. In that respect, journalism has been vulnerable to criticism
based on both conceptions, each of which has something to say about
institutional performance. Both come to a similar diagnosis even if
from different places: presenting a media out of touch,
unaccountable, conflicted, and corrupt. But the right-wing attack
more often defines the problem as a matter of a media imbalance,
within the framework of partisan differences. Its corrective becomes
a matter of policing the boundaries of professional discourse, to
make sure it conforms to the “right” politics or, in a more extreme
version, to populist requirements. This, however, distorts the reasons
for institutional failings – making the remedy narrowly partisan
rather than systemic. A broader critique reveals that institutional
dysfunction is not just a matter of political bias, but a function of
self-perpetuating elites leading those institutions, cut off from those
they serve, and working to coordinate a narrow class outlook.
Institutions may be pejoratively labelled “elitist.” This line of attack
has intensified over the last several years, with populist rhetoric
charging that elites, including within media, are out of touch with,
and have interests antithetical to, the people. But these are concerns
that have long been raised in other contexts, especially to the extent
that elites are closely aligned with experts and expertise.
Institutional experts in government agencies, for example, have been
attacked for providing politically inconvenient information, whether
on meteorology, economic trends, or foreign policy. At times, these
experts uphold their institutional integrity at their peril, such as
when a local branch of the National Weather Service contradicted the
president’s warning that a hurricane would reach Alabama – only to
be undermined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, which cautioned it against opposing Trump’s claim
(Blow 2019).6
From a broader epistemological vantage point, as discussed earlier,
New Left theoretical currents have positioned knowledge as indelibly
linked to power, and therefore suspect. Ironically, however, the press
has had a conflicted view of its own role as an elite sector implicated
in this knowledge production. Journalists themselves, though
perceived by others (at least at the national level) as part of the elite,
have been suspicious of expertise by nature – favoring a view of
journalism that follows John Dewey more than Walter Lippmann, a
journalism on the people’s side. Schudson argues that they “see
themselves as professional outsiders and act as snipers against the
very notion of expertise” (2018: 78). American journalism
historically has privileged among its ranks the generalist, the insider,
and the common-sense of the everyman (certainly not the
intellectual), even when certain journalists rise to celebrity status.
So, even as institutions have been under assault, the charge of
“media elite” has a conflicted quality, as a concept built on internal
tensions.
Journalism’s idea of its own expertise has not helped its cause. Some
years ago, James Carey attacked the role of professional expertise
from inside journalism education, as president at the time of an
academic association with a strong professional mission, the
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
In seeking professional status, his argument went, journalism kept a
vocational mentality that emphasized training and professional
codes over moral principles – its claiming professional expertise was
simply a way to further its own status-seeking and prestige (a theme
I dealt with earlier, in Chapter 2). But as Anderson (2017) points out,
that line of thinking has played into the hands of anti-intellectual
critics. Anderson contrasts Carey’s view of journalism’s pseudo-
professionalism with that of the “cautious but critical” Michael
Schudson (2006), who has advocated the importance of experts in a
democracy. The framing of this debate shows how difficult it is to
thread the needle between properly recognizing the constructed
blind spots created by a status-seeking professionalism and not
rejecting the value of elite-centered expertise – a rejection that gives
aid and comfort to the growing post-truth attack on expertise itself.
If journalism has an uneasy acceptance of its own expertise, which at
worst becomes an intellectually hollow basis for vocational status-
seeking, it also has had a dysfunctional relationship with other
institutional experts. That has meant relying on an often-narrow
range of what is considered acceptable, mainstream expert opinion,
or avoiding altogether the kind of reporting that needs a depth of
expertise. It’s too hard and too expensive, and too likely to result in
criticism. Treating politics as a game, as a matter of insider strategy,
of snark and detachment, is easier and more suited to professional
norms and commercial imperatives. In his defense of experts, and as
counter to this mentality, Schudson (2018) further argues that
journalism should embrace and stick to its own expertise of deep
investigation, the kind that holds power to account. As models,
however, he relies on the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the
Washington Post, in helping launch, for example, the #MeToo
movement. This may overstate the case, given that these are the
outlets that have the resources for such investigations, but they
constitute a narrow spectrum of the new hybrid media
infrastructure. So, what is the proper institutional alignment with
expertise? That question requires a deeper look at the competing
visions of institutional elites.
In 1986 Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter published the first serious
social science analysis that most clearly expressed the conservative
media critique: The Media Elite: America’s New Powerbrokers. The
authors established their premise with the title, arguing that an
unprecedentedly powerful and concentrated group had emerged that
could be located within the mainstream media: “Today, the
traditional elites are challenged by new opinion leaders and
institutions that have gained immensely in influence since the 1960s”
(1986: ix, my italics). In this case, media elite meant those working
for the elite media, which were identified as the major national
newspapers, news magazines, and news networks, not unlike the
organizations of interest to other media sociologists at the time –
such as Herbert Gans (1979) in his Deciding What’s News. These
authors, however, were concerned not with the workings of the
institution but with the liberal perspectives of the journalists
themselves. Gans (1985) himself later attacked their work in the
pages of the Columbia Journalism Review, for failing to account for
professional dictates presumed to mitigate bias, and for being too
ideological in their data-gathering and analysis (also see Reese
2009). I agreed with Gans at the time, and was concerned that such a
partisan-tinged academic effort would give scholarly respectability to
anti-media and anti-professional interests, as indeed it did.
The findings that journalists were more likely than the average
American to be urban, unchurched, liberal Democrats quickly
became the common wisdom, and launched a stream of less
academically cloaked titles. William Rusher, former publisher of the
conservative journal of opinion National Review, wrote a more
clearly partisan broadside against news bias, framing the concern in
similar terms: The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power
of the Media Elite (1988). Other more sensational and less reasoned
criticism would follow, launching the media-bias exposé as a growth
industry, with Bernard Goldberg, for instance, drawing on his own
former media-elite status and becoming a suitable Fox News regular
with Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News
(2002). Of course, targeting only the media in the eastern urban
centers, as did the Lichters-Rothman book, guaranteed a sample of
respondents that produced the feared results, and the individual-
level focus, as Gans charged, ignored the organizational logic behind
the news product – but these authors were on to something in any
case. The major elite news media had grown vastly larger, more
concentrated and consequential from the 1960s onward, especially
with the development of television news as a nationally distributed
platform (as in the Cook-Sparrow institutionalist thesis). And in
identifying these mainstream media as an elite, the authors captured
something of their institutional quality. Still, the media elite were not
a free-standing center of power as the critique implied, but they were
in other respects, such as being unaccountable and prone to group-
think based on their elite, geographically narrow position – which
lined up with the findings of other academic analyses. Major media
hiring patterns from Ivy League schools or other elite sectors
reinforced that outlook. Much later, right-wing MSM critics like Fox
have been able to capitalize on this critique, even if hypocritically
positioning themselves as on the side of the average American, in
spite of their operating out of coastal bases in New York and
Washington (e.g., Peck 2019).
Taking a less partisan perspective, others have more recently
acknowledged that this media elite view captures something
important about the institution. Journalists are a high-status social
group, at least in terms of cultural capital, and in spite of the
economic difficulties of the industry – especially in the coastal elite
zones where the most high-profile media figures are concentrated.
More nationally representative surveys by David Weaver and
colleagues (2007) show that journalists are closer to the general
public in their beliefs and backgrounds than the focus on the elite
news organization would indicate, but that points to part of the
problem. Journalists in “fly-over” states have been hit hard by the
decline of daily newspapers, with a pronounced shift in employment
toward the urban-coastal headquarters. According to a 2016 survey
by Politico, the great majority of new internet publishing jobs are
clustered disproportionately in major cities on the east and west
coasts (which happen to be more liberal), replacing the more
geographically dispersed and locally rooted daily newspapers, and
contributing to a media bubble disconnected from the rest of the
country (Shafer and Doherty 2017). Shifting to an identity-based
perspective, Kreiss (2019) observes that these urban-coastal
journalists are the ones who have succeeded in playing by the rules of
the competition, in their education and ability to navigate the global
economy – unlike many in more precarious zones of the country. The
social identity of journalists affects the way people perceive media
reporting, over-riding its professional claims of being fact-based –
which become largely irrelevant. Kreiss further advocates that
because these journalists are unlike the public they serve (especially
in fly-over country, which now must rely on them more heavily for its
news), they must make a greater effort to connect with these rural,
inland regions.
This view of the media elite, stemming from conservative politics and
amplified by right-wing media, thus links two important elements:
first, that the mainstream news media constitute an influential and
independent social actor, and, second, that their decisions and the
values that guide them are disconnected from the public they are
supposed to serve. These elements are actually well established and
non-controversial, but it’s easy to see how the logical next step was to
assign blame to the liberal media elite. That is mislabeled, but the
“liberal-bias” framing nevertheless has been politically convenient,
more easily communicated, and better monetized. It fits well within
the populist rhetorical attack on behalf of those society has left
behind and against out-of-touch elites. To the extent it targets the
mainstream media, this critique captures some real institutional
shortcomings, even if providing a limited and unsatisfactory
systemic diagnosis.
From an elite theory perspective, on the other hand, media are not
free-standing but operate in synergistic relationship with other elites,
through exchange of personnel, financial interdependence, and
common schooling and values. I touched on this idea earlier as a
basis for media critique, but the view of elites bears further
elaboration. In The Power Elite, Mills (1956) saw the dominant
institutions of business, state, and military forming the apex of
society, and rejected pluralist assumptions of a self-righting
harmonious balance of competing interests. In this respect, media,
as another elite sector, are completely bound up with the powers that
be. Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model had a related
meaning for elite, as a unified and entrenched ruling class that
controlled the media as a self-serving instrument. In this respect,
critical theorists have shared with populist rhetoric the concern over
media becoming too cozy with the powerful, but not to the extent of
rejecting the value of the institution itself. In pointing out the larger
system-maintaining nature of news media, journalism from this
critical viewpoint is regarded as inherently political (not just liberally
partisan) and incapable of real objectivity. The differences between
the two major US political parties, to which the media are indexed in
their range of accepted political discourse, are regarded as less
important than their functioning as two wings of the larger business
party. Thus, media bias favoring one party over the other was never a
significant concern on the left, which deemed it a matter of
intramural conflict and less consequential than larger systemic
issues. In the left-critical view, what matters most is the vertical
dimension of power, unmasking powerful state and corporate
interests, the concentrated privilege of a self-perpetuating elite, and
exposing the way media facilitated that injustice. The right-
conservative critique, on the other hand, operates on a more
horizontal dimension of the political spectrum, less concerned that
there is an actual elite with great influence than that the elites who
staff the media sector don’t seem to favor the partisan leanings of
their conservative (and/or tribal) critics. Both positions reflect real
concerns over institutional dysfunction, but, I would suggest, are not
equally sincere about their motives. This is reflected in the vast
resources that have flowed disproportionately from corporate and
other right-wing philanthropy to think-tanks and their pundits
supporting the critique on the right, which is far more compatible
with these political leanings and the larger interests of capital.
In the current moment, anti-establishment populism has distorted
how elites have been traditionally conceptualized, depicting them as
a target for political attack while masking how other elite interests
are still being served. This populist dynamic works the same
internationally, but here I return to the political context with which
I’m most familiar. Although framed in the language of populist
appeals, the conflict between a Trump-led political faction and others
has disrupted the balance of competing elite interests. The president
certainly isn’t a man of the people in terms of his background or
actual policy preferences, other than his ability to feed a popular
grievance culture. He has allowed corporate interests to staff and
write the rules of his administration, even more than have previous
administrations. Big business provides the cabinet-level appointees
and other legislative blueprints, meaning lobbyists push against an
open door in wielding influence – against environmental regulation,
for example, and for less progressive tax rates. Although elites as a
whole have benefited from system-friendly media filters, as
highlighted by Herman and Chomsky, certain factions have not been
content with this already uneven playing field. The Koch brothers
and their Koch Industries philanthropy, for example, helped
undermine public trust in institutions by funding think-tanks such as
the Heartland Institute, which attacks climate scientists and the
journalists who have relied on them, systematically sowing doubts
about both. Attacking elite expertise has become a business strategy,
ironically promoted by wealthy interests, but it’s one that threatens
to bring down the entire enterprise. It is more clear now than ever
that there are real consequences of elections, as a political contest
between different interests, not just different members of the same
business party, and that populist leaders, even when they themselves
operate from within elite positions of power and influence, have
succeeded in further corrupting social institutions.

Conclusion
In this chapter I have tried to provide a variety of windows into the
ways the media institution has been implicated in its own
shortcomings. What is to be done about it raises a more difficult
question, but suggests action on two fronts. The left critique implies
that journalism should be more autonomous as a normative
standard, and more aligned with the public and communities –
something more easily accomplished when media are not part of
giant corporations that follow a commercial logic. To the extent that
it tied itself too intimately with the political institution, journalism
has been insufficiently autonomous and accountable to public
concerns, leading it to suffer the same decline of trust in a larger
system perceived as not working by many citizens. Robinson (2019)
argues that journalists thus need to “de-institutionalize” themselves,
which I take to mean, not to no longer be an institution, but to
unbundle themselves from their previous alignments. On another
front, Lewis suggests a related way forward: that, rather than
following its traditional self-centeredness, journalism should, in
addition to unbundling itself, emphasize relationships with the
public it serves, arguing that the evidence shows how a “relational
approach can strengthen the institutional bearings of journalism”
(2019: 3). This is consistent with non-profit subscriber-supported
publications like The Ferret in Scotland, which gives the public a
chance to pose its journalists questions for which it wants answers
and is to some degree a successor to the notion of public journalism,
a movement in the 1990s to use public opinion as a guide for setting
the news agenda so as to be more directly responsive to reader
concerns (I’ll return to these new models in Chapter 6). Clearly the
press has been implicated from any number of perspectives in its
own crisis of authority, which can’t be solved by simply pushing back
on critics, calling for greater public education efforts in news literacy,
or asserting an absolutist, constitutional defense of press freedom.
As the hybrid media system has grown, institutional critiques based
on a narrow range of national media need qualifying and expanding.
To understand the possibilities of reform, a broader view of the
institution is needed, beyond the limited group of mainstream media
that have been the conventional target, and beyond the traditional
profession marked by its own particular faults. A more complex
picture of the media system is required, taking in the composition of
media elites, their sources of expertise, and their intramural
struggles.
Another peculiar challenge presents itself to social science analysis of
press performance. A mature and stable news institution surely
warranted critique that identified where it fell short of its stated
ideals, in terms of being an independent watchdog and an
adversarial check on power. Those normative assessments are still
important, but academic observers have had a conflicted love-hate
relationship with the press. While recognizing the historical value of
a constitutionally protected institution, they have been eager to point
out the media blind spots and shortcomings, highlighting the
constructed quality of institutionally produced knowledge. They have
criticized journalists’ claim to professional expertise as merely a form
of status-seeking, even while the idea of expertise itself has been
under attack from outside the profession. I recognize that
researchers have been reluctant to play the apologist for an often
self-congratulatory profession, but during this period of profound
concern over the survival of institutions, the standard default posture
of critique has left the field ill-equipped to grapple with the threat to
democratic structures. Scholarly critics have operated from the
intellectual calling to speak truth to power, expecting that a powerful
institution would always be there and needed exposing much more
than defending. Reform-minded institutional criticism was intended
to draw attention to shortcomings in press performance as an
ameliorative goal, not to provide grounds for completely overturning
the system of journalism or rejecting its epistemological basis as an
important source for expertise. Now, with a less confident institution
under broader public attack, academic researchers find themselves
engaged in a difficult balancing act, having to be both critic and
champion,7 recognizing that institutional structures equally need
reforming and defending. I want to keep this challenge in mind as I
turn in the next chapter to identifying new structures in the hybrid
institution.
Notes
1 I had first-hand experience with this dynamic during my
administrative role as director of my school of journalism, leading
me to reflect on what I observed in the pieces cited here: Reese
(1999) and Reese and Cohen (2000).
2 I took advantage of the center’s programs but regretted not
having an opportunity for a more extended stay, coveted by many
senior colleagues in the field, before it was closed.
3 I developed a fuller critique of the museum’s ideology within the
context of framing theory, as contained in Reese (2001).
4 A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate seminar called
“Understanding 9/11,” and toward the end of the term I asked the
students what they thought I would have covered in the class but
didn’t. The answer, somewhat to my surprise, was conspiracy
theories, a subject about which there has been little scholarly
engagement as it relates to journalism.
5 Lev Grossman, “Why the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Won't Go
Away,” Time, September 3, 2006,
http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,153130
4-3,00.html.
6 As I write this in early 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has
brought the most serious challenge to date for the Trump
administration, forcing it against its own instincts to better
accommodate the important role of scientific expert knowledge –
and, one may hope, the public will do so as well.
7 I appreciate Matt Carlson’s phrasing of this point at the Future of
Journalism conference at Cardiff University, 2017.
5
The Emerging Hybrid Institution
The high-profile mainstream media attract criticism and attacks as
the institution’s most visible face, but they obscure the broader
structures, practices, and emerging realignments of journalism. The
traditional view of the institutional press, regarded as a unitary actor
and built upon internal coherence, is in tension with a fluid,
polarized, and multi-layered media eco-system. To defend and make
normative assessments for an institution we need to be more clear
about what it is, and what it is in the process of becoming. The
institutional press is not reducible to traditional news organizations
or the legacy media, nor has it been completely diffused and
flattened into a broader media eco-system. Technology has
undermined the privileged status of legacy media but also enabled
new ones. As a result, we need a perspective that captures how
different media configurations take on a form of institutionality,
which then can be more accurately critiqued and defended
(especially in view of the traditional shortcomings reviewed in the
previous chapter). Rather than assume a unified interpretive
community, this perspective would treat the relative level of
institutional coherence and normative consensus as an open
question, as variables. What are the parts of the institutional
infrastructure, including socio-technical systems and global
structures, that contribute to institutional autonomy and resilience?
To understand these shifting alignments goes beyond simple labels
of press and news industry. Thinking more clearly about the nature
of the institution reveals new cases for research and helps clarify
normative expectations – often limited previously to discussions of
press law and ethics – and how best to apply them to new
institutional alignments. In this chapter I develop this idea,
introduced earlier in Chapter 3, to continue mapping out the
institutional space for news.
Rethinking the institution means taking a more structural
perspective than does traditional thinking about the press. Within
this perspective a number of related concepts have come into
theoretical vogue. I have already invoked the idea of the media eco-
system, as a useful way to signal a more holistic concern with all the
elements that matter in a particular setting and how they interact
with each other – more specifically, in the news eco-system
(Anderson 2016). More broadly, the network metaphor has been
invoked to describe a networked public sphere. More specifically,
there is also networked journalism, first invoked to refer to how
journalism extends beyond the newsroom to include more
decentralized collaboration among professionals and amateurs. The
idea of the networked institution has also been used to refer to intra-
journalistic collaboration among news organizations (Anderson, Bell,
and Shirky 2014), while in her review Russell (2016) expands this
idea to include a broader field of activity more consistent with the
hybrid media system. So, the network concept, even if loosely
employed, has directed more attention to the interconnections in a
system, and the couplings among related fields of journalistic
practice. Latour’s (2005) Actor–Network Theory (ANT), although
semantically similar, takes the idea of a network in a different
direction, by emphasizing the assembling of socio-technical elements
into a consequential structure, but as the observer “follows the
actors,” as ANT methodology advocates, attention is directed to new
associations, beyond conventional categories of journalists and
newsrooms, which have become unsettled.1
Even as these conceptual shifts better capture the changing face of
journalism, there is still the question of who if anyone is in charge,
who is exerting the most influence, and animated by what values. If,
as Castells argues, the Net is the terrain over which global power
flows, this still doesn’t explain the shape of that power. What is the
continuing role of institutions and their newly networked
adaptations in coordinating that power and providing its normative
value? Castells doesn’t explicitly theorize that role, so the task is to
determine how institutions are adapting to the global networks in
which they are embedded.
The press is now a hybrid institution that extends beyond the news
organization and newsroom, based on new assemblages of
professional, civil society, and technological elements. Oppositional
elements move in and out of alignment, as revealed at both the social
practice level and in larger macro structures. This idea draws on
what Chadwick (2013) calls the “hybrid media system,” which as he
outlines it includes “all relevant media” (news and non-news,
professional and social), emphasizing the practices carried out
regardless of the organizational container. He captures the way old
and new media logics combine, and how opportunistic assemblages
of newsmaking arise during information cycles, to be reassembled in
different forms at another time. This better captures the new
complexity of journalism, where power is no longer centered within a
single a priori defined institution, and interests become aligned in
ever re-creating contingent interactions (e.g., Domingo and Wiard
2016).
The hybrid media system touches on a number of related questions
that need to be sorted out in conceptualizing its institutional aspect.
As discussed earlier, there is the temporal dimension: the media
system is hybrid over time, with old and new forms joining together
to create new ones. There is also the distributed aspect, not
necessarily combinations of old and new, but describing at any given
time a post-organizational, diverse mix of actors, norms, and
technologies, where social and material elements are conceptualized
as more meaningfully integrated. And then there is the cyclical
aspect, where we can know what goes into the system by examining
the dynamic engagement and interaction of all the parts over time,
bound together in their mutual reactivity, rather than a formal
ordering within an organization. The latter two aspects, the
distributed and the cyclical, are particularly relevant in capturing
shifting institutional realignments, and they overlap with yet another
useful concept, that of the assemblage, which describes something
akin to this distributed and processual quality of the hybrid media
system. I am drawn to this assemblage concept, although I may use it
somewhat loosely to refer to an array of institutional components
that are more diverse than often conceived. The term has been
adopted across a number of disciplines, and is often theoretically
linked to DeLanda (2006) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987), but
others like Sassen (2008), in her application to international
relations, use it more descriptively. Her idea of global assemblages,
for example, describes the combination of territory, authority, and
rights. I use it similarly to describe a network of elements that is
emerging and dynamic. An assemblage, as Wise (2014) describes it,
carries the sense of an active process, of putting elements together,
an unfolding, not in a random or unpredictable way and not in a
rigid set of steps, but in order to do, express or claim something.
If assemblages are in the process of becoming, then when have they
arrived, and when do they settle into something institutional? We
need to think about what assemblages have become sufficiently
valued to settle into a stable, predictable, and controllable system for
producing democratic outcomes. The ontologically diverse mix of
actors, technologies, and logics that go into assemblages can make it
seem as if no one is in charge, so to what extent is there any
institutional intentionality or self-awareness? Indeed, is there still an
institution at all, and if so, what evidence of its existence is required?
And where can it be located? Things don’t just happen; there must be
some strategic agency involved inside these assemblages. As
Anderson (2010) concludes from his study of the Philadelphia news
eco-system, news does not flow naturally through the system but has
to be “pushed” by a variety of promoters. And we should be able to
observe the outcomes of this combination of strategic activities and
opportunity structures to determine how best to intervene with
specific policies, to strengthen what are often fragile and contingent
relationships that help ensure the most desirable outcomes.
These, what I would call more structural perspectives, offer new
insights on how to conceptualize the institutional press. I don’t
propose to synthesize them into a single framework but rather to
draw from them in helping rethink the view of the institution itself.
Here it is useful to recall my previous definition:
An institution is a complex social structure formed by an
interlocking network of rules and activities, roles, technologies,
norms, and collective frames of meaning, which work together to
sustain its coherence, endurance, and value.
In view of this, the hybrid institution is a complex structure which
does not require a new definition so much as a reimagining of the old
one. To understand and identify the hybrid institution requires
giving special attention to this interconnected network, formed by
new assemblages. These take on institutional features to the extent
that they become stable and cohere around certain norms, in such a
way that their value to society can be discerned. The building blocks
of the new institutionalism theoretical perspective, reviewed
previously, are organizations, which take on what is termed
institutional isomorphism to the extent they do similar things, but
the hybrid institution lies in the networks of circulation and
assemblage embedded within and among these associations. I
suggest that there is an institutional core running through the hybrid
media system, one that is adapting and absorbing new practices,
while it protects against threats to its stability.

A hybrid institutional typology

To be fair, the institutionalist perspective accommodates more of this
hybrid variability than it is given credit for. Tim Cook (2006), for
example, helped promote the idea of the press as an institutional
actor, but recognized that the press is not an undifferentiated mass.2
He anticipated a hybrid system by acknowledging that the institution
is more complex and less homogeneous than is often assumed under
the institutionalist approach in a mass media period, especially
considering how much of the research has been carried out on the
elite major news organizations. There is also a permeability between
the boundaries of the media institution and others with which they
engage. If political scientists have used Congress and the presidency
as their instituted models for understanding the media, Cook
suggests that the interest group system is a better fit, a loose and
complementary mix of groups of all kinds that together are just as
varied as the “news media system.” If, as Cook argues, the media
institution is more like this system, then what are the connections
that bind it together? Indeed, the other frequently cited
institutionalist along with Cook, Bartholomew Sparrow (2006), also
acknowledges that the institutional divisions are now more evident
and include the partisan media firms and others, raising more
strongly the question as to whether there is indeed a single
institution. Certainly, not as it once was. Participants in the hybrid
institution are solving uncertainties in different ways now, relating to
the state differently, and relying on different sources. So, again we
may ask in what sense is it still an institution? To the extent that the
institutional approach points to what is more similar than different
about media practices, it can still be a useful way to approach the
hybrid system. But it requires being open to a greater mix of
activities, which together have something in common, something of
importance to the larger social sphere over which they preside.
Returning to the discussion in Chapter 3, it is clear that, in spite of
these accommodations, the theoretical perspectives engaging
journalism as an institution are not adequate to the task of
describing its emerging forms. Earlier, in describing previous
research, I divided the institutional level of analysis, creating two
levels-within-a-level: macro-structural and micro-practice. With an
eye on institutionality, these two levels roughly capture, in the first
case, studies of media systems, and, in the second, the more
ethnographic-level newsroom research. Both these categories tend
for different reasons to reinforce a view of institutional coherence,
mainly by making the institution tantamount to the news industry
and its big news organizations. Given the disintegration and
realignment of journalism, this is no longer tenable. Other
perspectives have also overstated this level of institutional
coherence. Scholars like Schudson (2014), as mentioned earlier,
make assumptions of shared “norms of reasonableness,” but that
argument depended on an unproblematic view of what constitutes
the institution, exemplified by choosing elite national news
organizations. Schudson’s idea of monitory democracy, as Graves
argues, requires this reasonableness and good faith, and that its
members “draw on a common universe of news and public
information” (2017: 1246) – conditions not now in evidence.3
Institutional coherence has been disrupted, and it’s more usefully
kept as an open question, concerning how it is affected by these
realignments of journalism and what conditions lead to greater or
lesser degrees of coherence. This becomes easier when considering
the more structural perspectives, discussed above, that do not place
as much emphasis on the organization, and which are in a sense
post-organizational. Therefore, I introduce a second dimension to
more adequately accommodate emerging developments, reflecting
the structural emphasis – that is, the relative emphasis on
organizations as institutional building blocks. Previous research,
particularly the work guided by institutionalism, has been rooted in
organizations, while other work has taken what I might describe as a
more assemblage-based view.
Using these dimensions – level of analysis and structural emphasis
– I can now expand the prior simple division into levels to form a 2-
by-2 typology (Figure 1). This both captures the major theoretical
approaches that I wish to discuss regarding the institution and helps
locate a number of hybrid-related developments, cases, and
questions that are relevant to each of the four quadrants.

Figure 1 Typology of perspectives for institutional media analysis

Now, institutionally relevant cases discussed earlier can be put in
this larger context and newer ones added to this typology. Studies
characterized by the first column, reviewed previously, have tended
to assume a high degree of institutional coherence for the reasons
mentioned, while the institutional realignments within the second
column make that coherence an open question. Quadrant I, for
example, describes the macro-level analyses of media systems, for
example, discussed earlier, while Quadrant II describes the practice-
level research typified by the traditional newsroom studies (Ryfe
2006, 2012). Differentiating the more assemblage-based structural
emphasis adds Quadrants III and IV and produces a typology for
considering hybridized developments across the range of studies, to
consider how these emerging realignments contribute to the hybrid
institution.
At the macro level, the first quadrant (QI) includes recognizable
traditional newsrooms and larger media systems. In this respect, it is
most closely related to the institutionalist perspective, but the hybrid
development in this area can be seen in the way reporting norms
have evolved beyond the old emphasis on beating the competition
and withholding proprietary information. As the nominal boundaries
and size of the news industry have shrunk, with layoffs, closures, and
cutbacks (with notable exceptions at the top elite media), greater
emphasis is placed by necessity on collaboration. This suggests a new
macro-level alignment guided by relative agreement on what is
newsworthy. Examples of this collaboration in the US include the
most common case of separate newsrooms working independently
but sharing the results on an ongoing basis. Other examples include
co-created works but also one-time projects where the work is
integrated across several news organizations, such as the scandal
reporting based on the massive Panama (and recently Paradise)
Papers leaks.4
This latter example of large-scale document leaks has encouraged
cross-national collaboration on projects, coordinated by groups like
the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
This kind of collaborative ethos among international professionals
has been successful in producing award-winning results for the
participants and worked to broaden the institutional leverage of a
more distinctly globalized press. Carson (2019) concludes that
investigative journalism is actually thriving (even if global
collaborations may displace more local focus), because as evidence-
based reporting it helps to combat declining credibility and counter
the fake-news narrative, and also provides an appealing value
proposition for struggling media organizations.
Berglez and Gearing specifically argue that the work of the ICIJ
advances a “global network journalism,” and a “global fourth estate”
(2018: 4573), holding power to account across borders. The multi-
country collaboration on the Paradise and Panama Papers and the
Luxembourg Leaks investigations involved mainly traditional media
organizations, including the Guardian and the German
Sueddeutsche Zeitung, with the ICIJ providing what the authors
argue is a “creative hub” that encourages professional reform from
the inside. Although Berglez and Gearing give special attention to
how this network creates a “global outlook,” I find it significant in
itself that the quality of journalism made possible by this global
synergy provides aspirational models for a far-flung institution and
strengthens its resilience against attacks by any single state. In the
wake of major global stories based on such document dumps, the
former BBC Director of Global News, Richard Sambrook, argues in
favor of collaboration, noting that, rather than competition between
smaller start-ups and larger legacy organizations, a mutually
advantageous institutional partnership is possible: “Where they
come together – in pursuing global accountability – they can
complement and learn from each other. Big media can provide scale,
reach and institutional strength while smaller organizations can
provide new perspectives, new skills and new audiences.”5
Other collaborations are taking place between news and non-news
organizations, aided by a technology infrastructure that facilitates
leaking data to cross-national journalists. For example, when the
transparency activist organization WikiLeaks released vast amounts
of information, leader Julian Assange chose to partner with
professional news editors who were able to bring context and
meaning to the data-dump – even though ironically, as Coddington
(2012) showed, those editors later sought to distance themselves
from Assange for his lack of “institutionality.” Only through this
partnering, however, could WikiLeaks accomplish its goals,
effectively extending the investigative capacity of a more hybridized
version of the institutional press.
Some of these collaborative efforts are themselves led by new
institutional structures, such as InsideClimate News (ICN), a
Pulitzer-winning, non-partisan, non-profit independent organization
that facilitates better reporting on climate change. In 2018 it started
the National Environment Reporting Network, to be a catalyst in
leading collaborative efforts in a number of newsrooms across the
country. The Midwest-centered initiative in 2019 featured reporting
in a diverse array of newsrooms, including a number of non-profits
such as Iowa and Michigan Public Radio but also non-traditional
newsrooms like the Better Government Association and the Indiana
Environmental Reporter – along with daily news journalists from the
Wisconsin State-Journal and Minneapolis Star Tribune. As ICN
executive editor Stacy Feldman asked, “Can we serve a whole
journalism eco-system?”6 ProPublica’s collaborative project on
documenting hate crimes involved some 180 partners over three
years, working on reporting based on the data it compiled – a model
for investigation that is becoming more common as newsrooms
collaborate around a shared data source (Glickhouse 2019).
These collaborations can help create a resilient institutional
structure that is also more effective within a particular country. The
non-profit amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism in
South Africa espouses values of independence and transparency in
seeking to support the entire media field. “AmaBhungane” means
dung beetle, with the center’s motto being “digging down and
fertilizing democracy.” According to one of its investigative
journalists, Susan Comrie, the center seeks to build coalitions with
trade unions, civil society, and other media in reporting on the ways
private interests have engaged in state capture. Projects have
included #Guptaleaks, a massive trove of emails, which led to a
collaborative investigation into government corruption while
building a “positive collaborative space for journalists.”7
This perspective alerts us to other positive outcomes of cross-border
institutional collaboration. The larger world of globally distributed
newsgathering takes on a life of its own at times, beyond variations
of national context and authoritarian threat. A recent cause célèbre
illustrates this idea. Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed in Malta in
2017 by a bomb planted in her car, presumably because of her
aggressive reporting in that country, although those behind the
assassination or their specific motivation have not yet been
discovered. Journalism has always been a dangerous profession in
many parts of the world, especially when it threatens powerful
interests, and violence directed against a reporter in this case sent a
clear message to others investigating money laundering and
corruption in that EU-member island. But Galizia’s case also shows
the value of this broader institutional interconnectedness, which in
her case has extended globally, as did her reporting based on the
Panama Papers. Although it took the form of a one-woman
investigative journalism blog, her work has been amplified
posthumously by a fifteen-country collaboration of eighteen news
organizations, including the New York Times and Le Monde.8 The
platform, called Forbidden Stories, was founded by the non-profit
NGO Freedom Voices Network, and states on its website that “By
protecting and continuing the work of reporters who can no longer
investigate, we can send a powerful signal to enemies of a free press:
even if you succeed in stopping a single messenger, you will not stop
the message.”9
The global dimension of journalism is illustrated in the NGO
infrastructure associated with it, a transnational, institutionally
coherent, common cause with corresponding professional structures.
The Yearbook of International Associations lists almost 100 NGOs
categorized under the category of “Journalism,” which collaborate
among themselves and with other civil society groups. The most
central groups in the network formed by the collaborative links
among them – as documented by Jeong (2015) using network
analysis – include Reporters Without Borders, the Federation of
Arab Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists, and the
Confederation of ASEAN Journalists (Asian). Their collaborative
projects include not only press freedom and capacity building but
also issues like the environment (which can serve as a safe discursive
space to start with in certain areas unfriendly to journalism).
Other kinds of interaction at the system macro-level (QI) in this
typology do not necessarily originate with traditional news
organizations. Powers (2016), for example, has examined how NGO-
generated journalism engages in similar professional practices as
traditional journalism and helps extend the reach of reporting in
covering humanitarian and other issues. NGOs can also enter into
mutually reinforcing relationships with professional journalism, with
the potential to be institution-strengthening. Groups like the
London-based think-tank China Dialogue, for example, produce
their own reports but have also worked in partnership with the UK-
based Guardian to support and legitimate Chinese journalists doing
environmental reporting in China (Dong 2013; Reese 2015).
Quadrant II suggests a different perspective on collaborative
projects, particularly among traditional newsrooms, with emphasis
on the practice level, but more specifically on those practices
(including technology enabled) that have the potential to strengthen
institutional performance through greater journalistic independence
and access to information. In spite of legacy journalism’s loss of
authority, it still maintains a core place in the circulation of
information. Le Cam and Domingo, for example, considered the
array of social actors involved in shaping news coverage of a
controversial case in Brussels, and how they sometimes bypassed
journalists through other channels. Nevertheless, they argue that
“professional journalism is still granted … the prerogative of
producing a legitimate account of events” (2015: 6). This quadrant
points to how journalists are using new technological affordances to
accommodate sources seeking to secure leaking information. The
White House has sought a high-tech solution for controlling these
leaks (e.g., the National Insider Threat Task Force set up in 2011),
but as is usually the case this is a matter of message control, not
genuine concern over national security, and threatens to curtail
necessary flows of information to and through the press.10 Other
tools have the potential to shift this balance of power, including the
Securedrop platform for whistleblowers managed by the Freedom of
the Press Foundation, and Confide (an end-to-end encrypted
messaging app). Similar developments include more publicly
available platforms, such as Factbase, aka Factba.se, a private
company that says it does not “engage in news and interpretation”
but will “locate, transcribe, index and make available” to the public
information that is tagged, searchable, and directly linked to the
source (including the entirety of Donald Trump’s interviews with
radio host Howard Stern). Although not officially a news
organization, Factbase can help facilitate more general institutional
transparency, and has served as the basis for numerous news
stories.11 A number of other interstitial organizations have emerged
that facilitate the use of technology with the reporting process, such
as the MuckRock Foundation, which calls itself a “journalism and
transparency non-profit,” and provides a clearinghouse for news
organizations to manage open-records requests, along with other
tools to help transcribe and manage the results.12 So, here we see a
number of extra-organizational partners, working through and with
traditional news organizations, facilitating institutional practices –
technologically and otherwise.
Quadrants III and IV, identified by the right-hand column of Figure
1, expand the typology to capture a variety of emerging patterns that
have institutional relevance, but are not as closely tied to traditional
news organizations. From a more network-informed focus, broader
journalistic assemblages transcend the traditional legacy newsroom,
where a clearly self-identified professional class explicitly advocates
for the institution with a unified voice. The evolving eco-system has
reduced the level of institutional coherence we can safely presume in
these assemblage-based categories, making it more useful to treat it
as an empirical question. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, Kreiss (2016)
points out that the ethos of digital journalism itself has celebrated
de-institutionalization for bringing greater expressive freedom for
citizen participation, a position that includes the celebratory anti-
institutionalism of the futurist “news gurus” (e.g., Clay Shirky and
others). That view, however, was directed toward the institution as it
once cohered in traditional news organizations, not the more
distributed institution revealed in a number of more recent studies.
Expanding into this right-hand column naturally acknowledges
institutional differentiation, including the interaction of traditional
media with bloggers and other platforms. To characterize the
perspectives that apply here, I refer to more recent work, inspired by
both the Network Society idea of Castells at the macro level (QIII),
and concepts of Actor–Network Theory from science studies at the
micro-level (QIV).
Quadrant III emphasizes the connectivity within and across the
institutional fields, where media elements combine into something of
an institutional structure, but without self-consciously proceeding
under the banner of journalism. The transnational fact-checking
movement provides a revealing example of the emergent hybrid
institution. In his research on the diverse range of fact-checking
practices, Graves (2018) still finds a journalistic core. Participants
are largely news organizations or former professionals, but even with
a significant participation of academic, political, and civil society
organizations they exhibit a shared journalistic discourse. This
makes fact-checking institution-strengthening by promoting
accountability reporting, but unlike in a traditional institutionalist
view the eclectic range of organizations involved in the global
network is clearly not isomorphic. As Graves observes, even
“fundamental divides may be disregarded in the context of a shared
institution-building effort” (2018: 624). What unites them is the goal
of promoting better reporting, without the traditional jurisdictional
disputes over professional authority, which has the effect of
expanding institutional boundaries: “Remarkably, news
organizations in the movement actively promote the work of political
reformers and civil society actors as journalism, even when their
practices or commitments defy professional norms” (627). Whether a
field or a movement, global fact-checking – as represented in such
different national contexts as Africa, Ukraine, South Asia, and North
America – also reveals a form of the hybrid institution not otherwise
visible with the traditional emphasis on stable professional and
political cultures.
Using a significantly different methodology, the network analyses of
Benkler and colleagues also reflect this macro-assemblage
perspective in Quadrant III, which does not start with the kind of
self-conscious institutional coherence on display through previous
research on large news organizations. For example, networks formed
by hyperlinks and other indicators of association illustrate how
traditional media interact with more specialized sites (Benkler et al.
2015; Faris et al. 2017). In one of the case studies by Benkler and
colleagues, an analysis of the policy debate regarding proposed
stricter internet copyright infringement laws between 2010 and 2012
found that, as the issue developed, the weight shifted from
supporting the proposed legislation in favor of those who thought it
infringed on freedom of expression: “We find that the fourth estate
function was fulfilled by a network of small-scale, commercial tech
media, standing non-media NGOs, and individuals, whose work was
then amplified by traditional media” (Benkler et al. 2015: 3, my
emphasis). The institution in this structure lies more implicitly, with
less well-defined boundaries, in a networked public sphere, which
Benkler et al. call the “range of practices, organizations, and
technologies that have emerged from networked communication as
an alternative arena for public discourse, public debate, and
mobilization alongside, and in interaction with, traditional media”
(596). Even if not the sole or primary participants in this network,
the traditional media, they conclude, facilitate an “attention
backbone” with regard to issues as they emerge – or, one could say,
an institutional structure.
A more recent study along these lines examined a media structure
based on over a million stories and 25,000 sources in the year before
the US 2016 presidential election (Faris et al. 2017). The network,
based on joint sharing patterns of posts on Facebook and Twitter,
demonstrated an asymmetrically polarized media eco-system.
Breitbart formed a right-wing hub, closely surrounded by Fox News,
the Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit, and similar sites, more distant
from and disconnected from the larger network – yet still able to
drive its preferred narrative of immigration back into that eco-
system. The result of this structure, according to the authors, “turned
the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively
insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview
of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it.”13
Thus, institutional structure can be seen in the extent to which news
sites engage with each other, and in those that separate themselves
out into a counter-institutional space, a structure characterized by
partisan differences. Clearly, not all media are engaged with the
larger institutional conversation and mission.
These network structures reflect another dimension of the old
media-bias debate, centered on the idea of partisan balance. The
media sites that cluster together do not just represent equivalent
filter bubbles at different ends of the political spectrum. They
demonstrate an asymmetric structure with respect to the underlying
institutional core. A Berkman Center report on the research findings
notes that left and center follow a “culture of accountability,” while
the right is more overtly biased.14 That is, they connect to more
clearly partisan media, while the left connects to more traditional
sources, referencing different voices across a political space – rather
than the insular world of the right-wing with no pushback on ideas,
where unfounded reports can circulate and get reinforced without
being repudiated – thus, lacking accountability (Benkler, Faris, and
Roberts 2018). This structure is reflected in the sourcing patterns of
the more partisan cable news channels, MSNBC and Fox News, often
treated as mirror images of each other on their respective political
sides. But while Fox’s opinion-programming line-up relies on
partisan guests to make their points, a casual viewing of MSNBC
shows that, in addition to relying on party-affiliated spokespersons,
it is more likely to include institutional actors, such as former or
current employees of the legal system or university experts.
The micro-assemblage Quadrant IV also incorporates a
heterogeneous group of institutional participants, but directs
attention to the level of journalistic practice. In the spirit of the
“assembling the news” perspective advanced by Anderson (2013) and
news networks (reviewed in Domingo and Wiard 2016), I would
characterize Quadrant IV as encompassing elements beyond the
traditional news organization, although often still centered around
the community and newsroom practice level. That is, institutional
participants are not required to be within a single news organization
or even the same profession. But as Anderson argues, “the status of
the traditional institutional newsroom must be continually
problematized” (2011: 152, my emphasis). In his ethnographic study
of the Philadelphia news eco-system, he provides a different
perspective on the institutional core, mapping, like Benkler,
hyperlinked news sites to guide his investigation, and finding that
bloggers, activists, and smaller news sites still relied on the
traditional daily newspapers to bring visibility to their issues
(Anderson 2013). This ground-level analysis showed that
“journalistic innovation and cross-organizational collaboration were
not only rhetorically praised but also institutionally optimal.”15
These perspectives follow the call of a number of scholars, even prior
to social media bursting upon the scene, for a more distributed
approach to newsroom ethnography (Zelizer 2004; Cottle 2007).
This is a post-newsroom era of journalism study, but the challenge
remains how to identify what is institutional about this new kind of
work.
Here there is also something of the spirit of Latour’s Actor–Network
theory, in the sense that it promotes the examination of associations
outside traditional containers. Latour (2005) advocated an approach
to science and technology studies that considered networks of
association between actants, which make no distinction between
human and non-human actors in identifying “things that exist.” This
perspective helpfully points to the importance of networks of
heterogeneous objects, which even as they map out important
elements outside of traditional news networks can still form their
own coherent “networks of association.” Even without adopting the
entire vocabulary of ANT-thinking, which others have developed in
greater depth (e.g., Lewis and Westlund 2014), this approach helps
us problematize the institution and reexamine its breakdown at the
ground level of ethnography, with an emphasis on news production,
circulation, and use. It approaches pre-existing institutional
structures with skepticism and asks how in “following the actors”
outside of the networks within which they are most visibly located,
relationships with technology congeal into stabilized forms of activity
and become something consequential. In this view, technology is not
something that is simply present or not within organizations, and not
just affecting or being affected by the people who use it, but becomes
embedded into habituated uses not otherwise obvious unless pulled
apart and traced. In any case, the embedded institution still
emerging from these new relationships needs to be better
understood.
Other provocative examples of emerging institutional alignments
also recommend themselves in this quadrant. For example, a 2016
civic data science initiative in Brazil crowdsourced funding from the
public to support a special investigation, termed Operação Serenata
de Amor. The team of nine people – including programmers,
scientists, sociologists, and journalists – created a transparent
structure of digital robots to monitor government data, track
corruption, and make formal reports to the government.16 This kind
of collaboration, although not contained within the boundaries of a
conventional news organization, or driven by news professionals,
certainly has the potential to strengthen the institution and its
contributions to democratic governance. This ethos of transparency
is reflected in other recent civic tech activism projects, such as g0v, a
leaderless, technology-oriented community that arose along with the
Sunflower Movement in Taiwan, which brought down the
government in 2016. The group helped develop open-source tools to
make government more accessible to citizens, providing some of the
institutional function of traditional journalism even if not connected
to it (Tang 2019).
In her view of journalism as activism, Adrienne Russell points to
new configurations of collaboration, extending beyond professional
newsrooms, which make contributions to the quality of the public
sphere and form new institutional connections. These include “data
justice activists, financial transparency groups, policy reform
advocates” (2019: 34). For example, after 2016, a collaboration of
data justice activists, financial transparency advocates, scientists,
academics, journalists, and others carried out hackathons to preserve
government data on climate change, fearing that the administration
might delete information inconsistent with its anti-science ideology.
This collaboration later developed into the Environmental Data and
Governance Initiative (EDGI), which has “established common
values and developed methods of achieving their aims” (Russell
2019: 34). Other cases Russell highlights include ProPublica’s
“Documenting hate,” an effort to build a database on hate crimes,
and CrossCheck, an anti-misinformation project directed at the 2017
French election and supported by Google and First Draft (a
verification organization formerly at Harvard and now independent).
This alliance of journalism with data justice and policy reformers
points to the importance of taking a more inclusive view of what
constitutes the institution, with greater awareness of common
values.
In another intriguing terrain of shifting post- and extra-
organizational assemblages, the proliferation of digital sensors
around the world yields massive amounts of data and has brought
about new opportunities for open-source investigations, especially in
difficult to reach conflict zones. These investigations can be
characterized as hybrid systems, based on a heterogeneous
assemblage of professional news organizations and NGO activists,
with data, norms, and practices cohering around a particular issue or
investigation, only to recede and later re-emerge in different forms.
Asmolov and Livingston (2019) have examined this new investigative
capacity by identifying a number of emergent organizational forms
operating as decentralized networks of experts, which draw on video,
satellite images, and other data to carry out investigations into
human rights abuses and other issues. These networks join with
traditional news organizations and instrumentally useful, better-
known NGOs like Amnesty International to promote their findings.
Among these new investigative operations are the Digital Forensics
Research Lab, sponsored by the non-partisan Atlantic Council
(“documenting human rights abuses, and building digital resilience
worldwide”); Forensic Architecture, based at London’s Goldsmiths
University; and InformNapalm, a volunteer organization founded by
a Ukrainian journalist and a Georgian military expert after the
Russian annexation of Crimea. In another prominent example, the
British-based online investigation website Bellingcat, founded by
former blogger Elliot Higgins, was first recognized for its
investigation of the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 disaster in 2014.
These new investigative assemblages have important implications for
how we understand the journalistic institution. Asmolov and
Livingston (2019) note how traditional organizations like the New
York Times have worked to “front” such investigations, a form of
taking credit for the work of others, but, as they argue in military
terms, also a strategic decision to reduce the “attack surface” by
relying on the less vulnerable component of the hybrid system to
protect against attacks on its overall credibility. This phenomenon
poses an interesting challenge for rethinking the institutional press.
In one sense, the dynamic and shifting hybrid system is conceptually
at odds with the idea of the institution. To the extent that hybrid
practices form new settlements that are “never entirely fixed”
(Chadwick 2013: 13), they are constantly evolving and in the process
of becoming, and thus run counter to the kind of stability expected of
institutionalized structures. To the extent that these settlements
cohere around consistent principles, however, they take on a larger
institutional shape. The organized projects around open-source
investigation, I would argue, cohere around journalistic values of
transparency and independence. Although not technically a news
organization, Bellingcat, for example, advocates on its website a
solidly journalistic mission: “At Bellingcat, we believe in holding the
powerful to account for their actions. We recognize that in order to
do that, analysis of contentious issues such as conflicts must be
conducted in an accurate manner.”17 The “show-your-work”
transparency encouraged by this kind of reporting supports
institutional quality, as does the sharing of expertise in the
workshops conducted by people like Higgins for traditional
journalists.18 Importantly, the hybrid form of open-source
journalism provides greater institutional resilience, with legal
protection, enhancement of credibility, a globally distributed hedge
against state suppression of information, and vastly greater
empirical support for investigations, otherwise unavailable to
conventional news or NGO reporting. Not only that, but this kind of
strategic decision-making by these new journalistic actors adds a
dimension of intentionality and agency to what otherwise often
seems to be an endlessly contingent and undirected assemblage.
Thus, although open-source reporting reveals a highly diverse array
of participants and technologies, one can detect a kind of
institutional logic embedded in these structures.

Conclusion
In this chapter I have tried to make sense of the emerging hybrid
institution, using a typology meant to both sort out the previous
forms of institutional analysis and provide a different vantage point
for rethinking new journalistic alignments. If the institution is no
longer merely equivalent to the news industry or news organizations,
then where is it to be found? In any number of places, ranging from
different collaborative structures to the transparency of open-data
reporting. From this perspective, institutional coherence becomes an
empirical question and prompts a search for those assemblages that
support it within the larger hybrid media system. The quadrants
formed by the proposed typology are based on the two dimensions of
level of analysis and structural emphasis, whether on traditional
organizations or broader assemblages, but I mean them to be
suggestive of a continuum of analytical possibilities, without rigid
boundaries. The typology also draws attention to hybrid aspects of
the counter-institution. For example, in unpacking the elements of
an organizational assemblage, some may be consistent with an
institutional press while others are not. Breitbart’s editors and
reporters, for example, may operate as traditional journalists, but the
publisher and the ideology of the site’s followers and commenters
reflect something quite different. Some other institutional structures
are not easily classified within this typology, but they show the range
of creative realignments of organizational strategy, and even provide
hope for a counter-populist pushback. A number of smaller, more
nimble news organizations, for example, have been able to resist
state repression through creative use of technology, and by finding
supporters among philanthropic sources like the Soros-sponsored
Open Society Foundation. The independent news organization in
Nicaragua, Confidencial, for instance, is currently working out of
Costa Rica due to a government crackdown on journalists, shifting
from advertising to subscriber support, while using YouTube and
Facebook to share programming. A proliferation of independent
outlets like this builds institutional strength in the region, using a
combination of remote working, traditional reporting, and
clandestine offices.
Until now, much of the communication field’s research has
proceeded as though it were relatively straightforward to define
journalism and journalists – in spite of how problematic those
definitions have become. Here I’m thinking in particular of the
numerous surveys of professional journalists, led by Hanitzsch,
Mellado, Weaver, and many others (Weaver and Wilhoit 1991;
Hanitzsch et al. 2011; Weaver and Willnat, 2012; Mellado,
Hellmueller, and Donsbach 2017). Working definitions of journalism
like Schudson’s “information about contemporary affairs of general
public interest and importance” (2003: 11) suggest how potentially
expansive this social practice is. So, rather than concern itself with
the definition, research has instead deferred wrestling with that
ambiguity, by largely defining journalists with respect to the news
organizations employing them. Other questions follow from this
classification, such as how they construct their interpretive
community and control their professional jurisdiction. A similar
challenge is faced with defining the institution, considering the wide
array of organizations that engage with each other to participate in
journalistic practice. The adequacy of previous conceptions is further
challenged by the rise of the counter-institution in the hyper-
partisan media, where there is no shortage of “information about
contemporary affairs,” but which bear little resemblance to what was
once regarded as institutional. The practices may look the same, but
the values are greatly different.
The institution should not be narrowly limited to those well-
established ways of operating, but reimagined as it reveals itself
across diverse settings, and that creates a new challenge. I am
certainly not the first to advocate rethinking the newsroom as the
basic unit of analysis for investigation, or to criticize the field for a
newsroom-centric approach that privileges a somewhat narrow view
of what constitutes journalism. Deuze and Witschge, for example,
propose to move beyond the assumptions of journalism as an
“inherently stable institution” (2018: 4), to examine it in networked
settings as a “moving object and dynamic set of practices and
expectations” (13). Their somewhat depressing view of the profession
emphasizes the precarity and insecurity of journalistic employment,
while acknowledging its co-created, non-hierarchical, flexible, agile,
and networked, post-industrial creative form. But again, this raises
the question of what the institution has now become and how these
hybridized developments contribute to its function (or not).
Witschge has joined with other colleagues to consider how the
hybrid turn is rooted in, but moves beyond, simple binaries to
emphasize unstable, contingent, and emerging configurations, where
norms are negotiated by the participants in a variety of what they call
“situations” (Witschge et al. 2018). Norms are among the elements
that go into these new situations, but there’s a different normative
level involved here, which I understand her group to be addressing;
namely, the larger principles imposed by the researchers themselves,
which leads to an important dilemma. That is, as the authors pose
the question, how can we be normatively pluralist in making sense of
the participants and yet morally responsible in our own hopes for
journalism? From my perspective, that means asking how the
boundaries of the hybrid institution are to be identified and
normative standards applied to them. New institutional structures
need to be identified “beyond journalism” and their social value
recognized. We should worry about preserving institutions but need
to do more work in identifying exactly what we should be worrying
about, and what is worth preserving. Institutions are more complex
than previously imagined, but it doesn’t seem sufficient to simply
conclude, as Deuze and Witschge (2018) do, that journalism is a
“dynamic set of practices and expectations.” Not everything can be
contingent and atypical, or else there are no sociological regularities
– and the test of institutional durability and social value cannot be
met. At some point journalistic structures have to coalesce into some
meaningful thing, into stable practices that are identifiable and
socially valuable. That’s the direction I’ll return to in the final
chapter, with a discussion of normative implications for the hybrid
institution.

Notes
1 Anderson and Kreiss (2013) note, however, that ANT has not yet
been adopted in the study of institutional politics, with its
emphasis on outcomes.
2 On a personal note, Tim and I were in a political socialization
seminar together in graduate school at the University of
Wisconsin, where I later recall seeing him in freezing weather one
winter holding a picket sign outside Vilas Hall when the teaching
assistants association went on strike. His work is still coming up
in my own.
3 I note that Graves uses “institutional coherence” to reflect a
broader coordination of social institutions around unwritten
 expectations of right conduct, but I’ve adapted it here to refer
more specifically to the institutional press.
4 See Sarah Stonbely’s report from Center for Cooperative Media,
NiemanLab, September 29, 2017, at
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/09/here-are-6-different-kinds-
of-collaborative-journalism-and-the-good-and-bad-things-about-
each.
5 “Paradise Papers Yet Another Example of the Power of
Collaboration in Investigative Journalism,” The Conversation,
November 14, 2017, https://theconversation.com/paradise-
papers-yet-another-example-of-the-power-of-collaboration-in-
investigative-journalism-87376?
utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitterbutton.
6 “How 14 Local News Organizations Teamed up to Cover Climate
Change,” Poynter, June 5, 2019,
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/how-14-local-
news-organizations-teamed-up-to-cover-climate-change.
7 Panel presentation at the International Symposium for Online
Journalism, Austin, 2019.
8 “Mastermind Behind Maltese Journalist’s Murder is Being
Protected,” Guardian, April 17, 2018,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/17/malta-
protecting-mastermind-journalist-daphne-caruana-galizia-says-
husband.
9 See https://forbiddenstories.org.
10 “Trump White House Shopping for Technology to Plug Leaks,”
Foreign Policy, March 3, 2017,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/03/trump-white-house-
shopping-for-technology-to-plug-leaks.
11 See https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/when-the-pri-mary-
source-is-trump-himself-factba-se-compiles-all-trump-on-all-
 platforms-at-all-times.
12 Panel presentation at the International Symposium for Online
Journalism, Austin, 2019.
13 “Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader
Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2017,
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-
study.php.
14 “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media
and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,”
https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/33759251.
15 “How Journalists’ Self-Concepts Hindered Their Adaptation to a
Digital World,” NiemanLab, January 17, 2013,
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/01/c-w-anderson-how-
journalists-self-concepts-hindered-their-adaptation-to-a-digital-
world.
16 “The Last Serenade,” Medium, February 20, 2017,
https://medium.com/data-science-brigade/the-last-serenade-
65fc1a9a0e2f.
17 See https://www.bellingcat.com.
18 “How a College Drop Out Became a Champion of Investigative
Journalism,” Guardian, September 30, 2018,
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/sep/30/bellingcat-
eliot-higgins-exposed-novichok-russian-spy-anatoliy-chepiga;
“These Reporters Rely on Public Data, Rather Than Secret
Sources,” New York Times, December 1, 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/01/business/media/open-
source-journalism-bellingcat.html?searchResultPosition=1.
6
The Sustainable Institution
In order for journalism to remain a viable institution it must at some
level be economically viable, but that has been one of the biggest
challenges of the last twenty years. As an institutional feature,
sustainability signifies commitment, predictability, professional
training, deep pockets for defenses against attack, and long-term
involvement in certain kinds of investigation. If sustainability is
crucial to institutionality, through what means – corporate and
otherwise – will that institution be supported? President Trump
delights in describing it as “failing,” but the New York Times has
been profitable and continues to gain subscribers, reaching a fifteen-
year stock price high in early 2020.1 The fake news problem, which
Trump has both created and exploited, has made a stronger case for
quality outlets, and this has benefited the big traditional legacy news
brands, underscoring their value proposition. Other organizations
outside the elite level, however, have not been as fortunate, leading
to a particular discrepancy between the economic health of local and
national media. I pointed earlier to visible success stories of global
collaboration among media outlets, but these periodic prize-winning
efforts have not replaced the civic role of daily journalism, where new
growth is badly needed to repair the damage. The dramatic
contraction of the daily newspaper industry has attracted the most
concern, and it’s unclear what will fill this civic knowledge gap. The
traditional issues of media economics regarding cross-ownership,
chain-ownership, and the effects of commercial considerations
across the organizational firewall on news judgment now seem
quaint by comparison with the current economic challenges. Publicly
traded media companies are driven to maximize quarterly profits,
leading to further layoffs from news staffs and consolidation of
ownership. In some cases, wealthy owners have brought deeper
pockets to these news organizations, but as Benson and Pickard
(2017) note, a less profit-driven private ownership has included the
relatively benign case of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos purchasing the
Washington Post, but also the more partisan-driven motivation of
Sheldon Adelson in his purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The economic unbundling of the daily newspaper has become a
familiar story. Just twenty years ago daily news leaders were
convinced that in spite of the growing impact of the internet they
were in a mature and stable industry. But then the classified
advertising on which they once relied was stripped away by sites like
CraigsList, and when they did make the transition to digital it was
just in time to have the giant intermediaries, Google and Facebook,
begin sucking up all of the digital ad revenue. With other traditional
content – including weather, sports, and movie and restaurant
reviews – further spinning off from its former home in an all-
purpose, single-provider legacy daily news format, the institution
and those relying on it were unprepared for having the value
proposition laid out so starkly. As part of a commercial profit-
making system, journalism was always prone to being captured by
elite business interests. More critical Marxian perspectives assumed
that kind of capture and naturally regarded media as mouthpieces of
capitalism. Other research traditions were willing to give journalists
and media more relative autonomy, but the professionalism on
which that autonomy rested, if not a complete smokescreen as some
argued, was always in a position of having to buffer elite pressures.
Now that the commercial system has been upturned, can unhooking
journalism from the profit-drive create a better space for the
institution to perform as it ought? I would say yes, and indeed the
economic challenges have revealed the market’s inability to provide
the kind of accountability journalism required, and might yet
facilitate a renewed call for broader media system reform. In this
chapter I review some of the different funding models for providing
economic support for the news enterprise, which together may help
constitute and support a more diverse and robust news institution.
These include examples from the US and elsewhere, where
sustainable mixes of non-profit, trust-supported, or public service
journalism have been developed.
From a new institutionalism perspective, media firms take on
institutional character to the extent that they adapt to similar
imperatives. They must be professionally credible, find reliable
sources of raw information, and, of course, make money.
Historically, in the US context, that last goal has meant advertising-
supported media, but as the commercial environment has been
disrupted and the business of for-profit journalism continues to
erode, a variety of new potential models has emerged at national and
local levels: a mix of commercial, philanthropic, grass-roots,
university-based, non-profit, and public service. The flight of
advertising revenue to the large platform intermediaries has
accelerated the case for direct support, both individual and public.
That means that similarities in money-making, at least, no longer
signify the shape of the institution, which has forced a rethinking of
what it actually is at heart, unpacking it from its organizational
housing and implicitly accepted business model. The transition away
from the advertising-supported heyday of journalism has seen some
predictable adaptations, especially among news start-ups, which
being more open to innovation integrate the editorial and business
sides more closely, with newsgathering no longer as buffered from
commercial considerations. Earlier I considered how news
organizations were more likely to collaborate than ever before,
creating a more institutionally aware journalistic field. But of course,
this collaboration also responds in part to an economic imperative,
and news organizations now happily rely on free non-profit,
foundation (or even university) supported investigative projects,
knowing this will offset their expenses. Collaboration means they can
do more with less, especially when they lack the resources to start
from scratch with their own projects. In this respect, economic
pressures have forced greater institutionality. Put another way,
organizations may be less institutionally similar now with respect to
economic models, but they have more in common in shared purpose
than in the way they fund that purpose.
The industry continues to struggle with this economic challenge, and
a professional and policy-maker consensus has not developed on
how to solve it. In some respects, the understandable alarm at the
rapid decline of the daily newspaper industry has drawn attention
away from the new experiments in alternative funding models, even
while it has brought the market failure of the traditional commercial
media system into greater focus. We still need, however, to keep
exploring the opportunities available to support the survival not only
of the news business as such, but also the larger institution and its
core values. As a relatively small subfield of research, media
economics examines markets, measures of concentration, and
consumer behavior but provides little guidance on what forms of
news will prove to be most economically sustainable. This rapidly
evolving conversation instead has been held mainly in the realm of
industry observers and think-tanks, rather than traditional academic
analysis.

Economic models
The era of mostly advertising-supported journalism had the effect of
hiding the actual cost of newsgathering; subscription costs to
newspapers were cheap and receiving broadcast news was free
(compared to Britain where a license fee was levied). Although the
public had been conditioned to expect this relatively free-ridership,
the economic basis for journalism has been newly problematized.
When the costs of news are no longer hidden, consumers are obliged
to contribute directly to those costs. In this respect, consistent
institutional values can be more easily detected, even across a diverse
array of platforms. Now that the normative mission has become
disentangled from the business model, the institution must justify its
worth more explicitly to news consumers. This has been most
directly tested where those consumers are invited to pay for the
product outright, as product (as in the paid version of Politico), as
journalistic cause (such as De Correspondent in the Netherlands), or
as a specific bespoke project (where a news organization proposes
investigations and pursues those that receive enough financial
support). Philanthropic foundation support has stepped in to help
meet the broader need, but this money also comes with its own
constraints and interests. Some have advocated moving away from
both private support and commercial pressures with, for example,
some form of permanent public media trust fund, supported by a
variety of taxes and fees. Pickard (2019) goes so far as to argue that
no profit-based business model can ever hope to meet the
democratic requirements for news, and that non-market-based
models must finally be acknowledged as necessary, with support
from philanthropy, publicly funded state support, and a tax on digital
platforms. But the kind of journalism that would qualify for that
funding and how allocation decisions would be decided are less clear.
But if the path to sustainability is unclear, we can still ask which
models seem most promising and how these different ventures will
continue to cohere institutionally. That requires evaluating these
business models against how we want the institution to perform,
particularly in preserving independence against the rising tide of
outside influence, including big money that distorts journalism’s
mission of working in the greater interest. Well-funded interests
have been attacking institutions and corrupting their mission for
years, with great accumulations of wealth funding a more aggressive
voice through both corporate and philanthropic channels. Resources
will be required to fight back and ensure institutional resilience.
Institutions are not always transparent in how they mediate social
action, but, particularly in the case of political and journalistic
frameworks, transparency constitutes a large part of their social
value. Even when advertising was a reliable source of funding, it
came with strings attached. This ranged from providing a generally
advertiser-friendly environment for product promotion to the
specific pulling of ads from outlets that violated the preferences of
particular business interests. That influence is more difficult to trace
now, and journalism, without a sustainable source of support, will be
increasingly prey to manipulation.
Philanthropy offers some hope for a benign source of support for
journalism, but much of the flow of resources through
concentrations of private wealth works against institutional values
and moves contrary to larger democratic benefits. Anti-institutional
alliances are reflected in these flows of money, even if much of it is
difficult to trace. The Heartland Institute, for example, is a member
of the Koch brothers-funded American Legislative Exchange Council,
part of the right-wing policy infrastructure, and backed by fossil fuel
industry interests. The Institute’s funding patterns show how the
attacks on both science and journalism are closely linked, with major
support flowing to both anti-climate change initiatives and the Media
Research Center, the wealthiest of the groups promoting the liberal-
bias attack against the mainstream media. The George Soros-funded
Open Society foundation supports a number of international
journalism causes that hew closer to institutional values, but right-
wing anti-media populists make Soros a predictable target. So
philanthropic support reveals some of the institutional fault-lines,
and they are not symmetrically balanced, with “dark money”
initiatives threatening to swamp the resources available for the
accountability reporting, which is itself intended to expose those
same interests. That kind of anti-institutional support has flowed
more freely following the US Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” case,
which removed the limits on spending for corporate political
communication. These funds have arguably flowed more
conspicuously to broad-based attacks on journalism than in support
of it. Soros has been an important institutional partner, but such
lines of support are not guaranteed after he is gone. This makes it all
the more important to find economically viable business models for
journalism, with non-corrupting, transparent sources of support.
The crisis in the news industry has led to a dizzying array of new
models, and old ones seeking to adapt their business plans. They
include the new digital native for-profit sites, such as Buzzfeed,
Politico, and Axios, but also non-profit initiatives trying different
combinations of membership, subscriber, and donor support. Those
have relied greatly on large foundation support, which even if well-
intentioned has its own critics. Although facing a strong headwind in
the US, public service media have their supporters as an essential
part of the mix. Supporting the creation of a Congressional
Commission for Public Support for Local News, the advocacy group
for freedom of expression, PEN America, has called in a recent report
for greater public funding, to catch up with the kind of investment
that supports European public media, with policies to ensure
editorial independence, a focus on local newsgathering, and
transparency measures about how funds are used (PEN America
2019). And the large digital platforms have their own critical role to
play in sharing some of the resources they have extracted from the
industry. Many of these new projects have been discussed elsewhere,
but I will briefly review them here with an eye toward their
implications for institutional resilience and social value. The key in
all these proposals is to be able to identify what type of journalism
qualifies as sound and consistent with institutional values.

Commercial models
Most news is commercially funded, so the disruption in this sector
has caused the most consternation, with revenue for local news
organizations, in particular, dropping precipitously in the last several
years. Advertising revenue for the daily newspaper industry, the core
component of local newsgathering, has dropped 67 percent since
2015, according to the Pew Research Center annual assessment of
the industry, with a continuing drop in staff employment, and
ongoing buyouts and consolidations. The same report showed that
the great majority (84 percent) of news consumers, habituated to
free content, contributed nothing to any local news source, whether
through subscribing, donating, or memberships. This unwillingness
to pay is internationally consistent, according to the Reuters Digital
News Report for 2019, which found that while the US actually
showed a significant increase in revenue with a “Trump bump” to 16
percent (most going to either the New York Times or Washington
Post), otherwise the proportion of people paying for news in a nine-
country average has remained steady over several years at 11 percent
(paying included “subscriptions, memberships, donations, and other
one-off payments”). The report concludes that “Most people are not
prepared to pay for online news today and on current trends look
unlikely to pay in the future, at least for the kind of news they
currently access for free.”2
In addition to the web-based versions of legacy news organizations,
an array of diverse, solely ad-supported digital news sites have
developed to appeal to the market for free information, from news to
pop culture, but many have struggled to survive, with layoffs at
several digital native sites becoming more common, whether at
Buzzfeed, Vice, Vox Media, or the Bustle group, including Jezebel,
Mic, and the late Splinter.3 Commercial sites are vulnerable to
external threats from wealthy antagonists with deep pockets, who
can drive them out of business if something about their coverage
displeases them. The gossip-oriented website Gawker covered
celebrities and the media industry but was driven into bankruptcy by
a libel suit financed by PayPal founder Peter Thiel (in what many
consider a dangerous precedent). But profit-seeking investors can
weaken their properties on their own, from the inside, by stripping
out newsgathering assets in favor of boosting the bottom line
(whether with daily local news organizations or specialty sites, such
as the post-Gawker Gizmodo Media Group). This race to the bottom
has led to a continuing erosion of traditional civic-oriented
newsgathering in many cities, with remaining outlets a shell of their
former selves. In my own state of Texas, even with its rapidly
expanding population and economic growth, the capital city’s
newspaper has shrunk steadily over the years. The thinned-out front
section of the print edition consists mainly of wire copy, along with
sports, and the occasional special investigation to give it local flavor.
The recent acquisition of the Austin American-Statesman by the
hedge-fund controlled Gatehouse Media – the nation’s largest media
chain and purchaser later of the Gannett newspaper group – led to
even more layoffs and buyouts (and more adjunct instructors
available to my school of journalism). The extent of the problem
associated with large newspaper chains controlled by this kind of
often predatory investor is documented in the expanding news
deserts report from the University of North Carolina’s School of
Journalism and Media.4 Into this vacuum, news sites that mimic
legitimate local news organizations have begun to insert themselves,
in seemingly community-based sites, such as Michigan’s forty-strong
network of connected and coordinated sites including the Lansing
Sun and the Ann Arbor Times,5 in addition to “Baby Breitbarts” like
the Tennessee Star.6 The funding and control of these sites, although
difficult to trace, favors conservative causes. The Sinclair
broadcasting group has imposed a similarly coordinated,
ideologically conservative imprint on the now 200 local television
news stations it has acquired, taking advantage of the declining value
of these stations in many communities. Sinclair’s case was the source
of criticism and ridicule when a video mash-up went viral,
juxtaposing news anchors reading a required common script on air
decrying one-sided news, with a message consistent with Sinclair-
friendly Trump and his charges of fake news.
Other commercially supported efforts have been less conventional.
France’s Mediapart, a successful and profitable site launched in 2007
by former French newspaper journalists, uses a subscription, non-
advertising model, challenging the conventional wisdom that readers
would not pay for news. Wageman, Witschge, and Deuze (2016)
consider this emergent online project part of a global start-up culture
for journalism, driven by a professional ideology and a return to
traditional journalistic values to re-establish civic responsibility and
professional reportorial autonomy. Projects like this have provided
renewed institutional energy by underscoring the importance of
independence. In the case of Mediapart, the start-up provides a place
where journalists can carry out, not necessarily “alternative,” but
what they consider “real journalism,” taking a quotation from Albert
Camus as its manifesto: “Any moral reform of the press will be in
vain if it is not accompanied by appropriate political measures to
guarantee newspapers a real independence in relation to capital.”7
To promote that independence from external interests, the
organization created a non-profit trust in 2019 to control its capital,
following the model of the Scott Trust’s support of the Guardian.
Retaining a subscriber model, with a transactional fee for service,
some general news outlets have secured sustainable revenue from
readers by charging for paywall access, but these have been mainly at
the elite national news level. Other organizations have a robust
funding model that ensures their independence, coupled with a
voluntary donation model. The trust-funded Guardian, with profits
reinvested according to its company guidelines into its journalism,
has been able to continue providing quality news and to make the
case for reader support for its mission, giving it an important
institutional role. According to Emily Bell of Columbia University’s
Tow Center for Digital Journalism, “As long as the Guardian can
afford to put its best journalism in a place where you don’t have to
transact for it, and the more we can persuade people to generate
revenue which enables us to do that, the better it is” (Hofseth 2018).
The controlling trust also has worked since 2017 through a non-
profit, theguardian.org, which according to the company “will raise
funds from individuals and foundations and direct them towards
projects that advance public discourse and citizen participation
around issues such as climate change, human rights, global
development and inequality.” In this respect, the Guardian operates
as an institutional hub, working to “advance freedom of expression
and freedom of the press, and explore opportunities for partnerships
across academia, think-tanks, non-profits, and other
organizations.”8

The non-profit arena

New non-profit projects have attracted much of the attention in
recent years, as an alternative to the traditional commercial model.
In fact, some US legacy newspapers may even soon pursue non-
profit status, following the lead of the Salt Lake Tribune. Unlike the
Philadelphia Inquirer and Tampa Bay Times, owned by non-profit
foundations, the Tribune itself is now granted that status in a
precedent-setting decision by the government, allowing it to receive
tax-favored donations – a decision that signifies the social value
accorded to news for communities. According to the plan, the
Tribune will not endorse political candidates and will take steps to
ensure editorial independence. Other non-profit start-ups have
launched independently of legacy organizations. These can be sorted
into those that emphasize the daily production of locally relevant
news and those with more specialized initiatives, around specific
issues, including education, criminal justice, and public policy.
Although subscriptions have always provided revenue for news
organizations, the non-profit sector has relied more directly on users
through payments of different types – drawing a more explicit
financial link between journalism and its supporters.
A variety of innovative projects has developed as part of the global
start-up culture around reader-supported journalism. Among these
is the first German non-profit, Correctiv (affiliated with the Global
Investigative Journalism Network), which is supported by
foundations and individuals, and aims for independence and
transparency in investigating “injustice and abuses of power.”9 Other
notable projects include De Correspondent in the Netherlands, which
invites financial supporters not seeking exclusive access but who
believe in the mission. In this respect, supporting news organizations
through membership payments is a form of individual-level
journalistic philanthropy. Other projects include the first online
investigative journalism platform in Scotland, The Ferret, which has
attracted a significant following to support the expensive work of
investigation, and is based on a co-op model, with citizens invited to
subscribe and help influence the stories pursued. Price (2017a) has
provided a case study of the project, founded in 2015 to “nose up the
trousers” of power, showing that it helps broaden the institution
through collaborative efforts, creating open-access data libraries that
others can use for additional investigation, and co-publishing stories
with national newspapers. Events are staged to help recruit new
subscribers, in order to establish a loyal core audience willing to
support the enterprise, avoiding the vagaries of foundations and
their shifting priorities. Similar to France’s Mediapart, The Ferret is
not counter-institutional in its attempt to present “alternative” or
“advocacy” journalism, but rather is “keen to present itself as
independent and upholding many of the traditional norms of
journalism, such as objectivity” (Price 2017a: 1348). Its supporters
believe in the mission of investigative journalism, and are willing to
support it for its broader democratic benefits. Just as Hamilton
(2016) finds traditional news organizations willing to carry out
projects that will never yield a direct return on investment, so are
readers willing to support organizations like The Ferret for the
greater good: “A journalism funded by the few, for the benefit of all”
(Price 2017b: 16). A similar approach is taken by Hungary’s
Direkt36, an online investigative journalism project that seeks to
provide journalism independent from politicians, owners, and
advertisers, and which has no paywall but provides extras to
supporters, including exclusive access to reports and events. The
project seeks to be transparent about its reporting techniques,
sharing them and creating community with the public via
workshops, roadshows, and even conversations in the street. Like
The Ferret, Direkt36 is also regionally focused, but as a Soros-funded
project it partners with the Global Investigative Journalism Network
to give its reporting greater reach. By idealistically promoting the
institutional mission, these projects generate enthusiasm among
their supporters, as in the case of Venezuela’s independent online
site, Efecto Cocuyo (“firefly effect”), founded in 2015 with support
from donations and crowdfunding, and the belief that sparks can
illuminate the nation.10
Some definitional challenges arise in deciding what kind of
journalism is worthy of non-profit status, but all non-profits show a
number of institutional similarities. In her analysis of three such
initiatives, Konieczna uses criteria that come close to resembling the
institutional values that characterize the new eco-system. They
include the production of investigative or “public service journalism”
(which she defines as that kind of news and information that makes
democracy possible), and being “nonpartisan and transparent about
funding” (2018: 59). In her use of the term field repair she shows
how the non-profits she examines, including the MinnPost and the
Center for Public Integrity, have different organizational structures
and approaches but have a shared sense of purpose with journalists
from traditional media in the overlapping commercial field. They
themselves came from those media and are working to repair the
field from within to help it endure. Thus, they are not creating
something altogether new, but emerge from and contribute to the
existing institution. A trade association of local, independent, online
news organizations, LION, encodes these values more formally,
requiring that its members produce information “in the general
public interest while upholding high professional standards,
including transparency, integrity, fairness, accuracy, completeness,
and accountability,” and they “must conform to standard, accepted
journalistic practices with a preponderance of original reporting.”11
Among the organizations devoted to producing a steady supply of
locally oriented civic news, The Texas Tribune has been a particularly
noteworthy success story among the non-profit start-ups, in a
growing state with shrinking news coverage. The Tribune has taken
up some of the functions of local newspapers, especially in covering
the state legislature and policy issues. The product is free, with its co-
founder and CEO Evan Smith emphasizing a data-driven and non-
partisan approach to news, being willing to collaborate with other
organizations (e.g., ProPublica), and stating that “We believe in
civility and civil discourse, but we hold people and institutions
accountable” (King 2019). Its steadily expanding news staff is funded
with a projected $10 million, through a combination of donors,
memberships, foundation support, and events.
In South Africa, the digital-only start-up Daily Maverick reports
success with a membership model in a challenging media
environment, with 7,000 currently signed up and 1.7 million
monthly readers, similar to The Texas Tribune’s model of tiered
levels of support selected by the member. A social contract is offered
to members who want to support the mission beyond just revenue
because they believe in it – in this case a voluntary contribution to
support quality journalism for those unwilling or unable to pay. The
publisher’s progress report in the Nieman Lab declared the
membership model as potentially the most rewarding feature –
“Reader revenue has freed us from the shackles of others we can’t see
or who don’t care. We’re taking back control of our own destiny
through the direct relationship with our members” – arguing that a
focus on quality journalism translates directly into increased revenue
(Charalambous 2019).
To better broaden local news, one of the primary investors in The
Texas Tribune has recently launched the non-profit American
Journalism Project, declared on its website to be the “first venture
philanthropy nonprofit focused on local news.” In the pitch to
investors, venture capitalist John Thornton presents the project as a
response to “America’s $1-billion a year local news problem.” That’s
the amount of money he calculates was sucked out of local daily news
coverage, with the roughly 50 percent decline in local newspaper
reporters since 2007, from 50,000 to 25,000. That, he argues, has
had dire consequences for democratic life, from first-order effects
that include a loss of shared verifiable facts and public interest news
(and the “muscle memory of compromise”) to a second-order effect
of less responsive and effective government.12 In seeking
philanthropic giving that is relatively modest compared to other
charitable areas, the project declares that “Through transformative
investments to Civic News Organizations (CNO), we are building a
new public service media that is governed by, sustained by and looks
like the public it serves.”13 It is unclear how well the project can scale
up these organizations, but it has been identifying those local non-
profit, non-partisan organizations that qualify as civic news
organizations, which employ “commercial media tactics” but will
ultimately be sustained by a variety of membership and other
philanthropic giving. “In other sectors, venture philanthropy has
created sustainable new ecosystems that fill gaps left by the market.
We are doing the same for local news.” Like other strategic
philanthropy, the project is seeking organizations that can provide
seed funding in partnership with local supporters, aiming to have
them establish their own fund-raising capacity. Qualifying news
organizations are expected to conform to a consistent institutional
profile – to offer a quality local news product that is free for all, and
transparent in its funding.
Beyond those organizations devoted to providing daily local news, a
range of issue-based projects has developed in the non-profit arena,
relying on a similar kind of mixed funding model, but often with
major launch money from a single individual donor-investor. The
earliest and most well known, perhaps, is ProPublica, with its
mission for investigative journalism – like the New York Times, it
saw a “Trump bump” in its fundraising, especially from individual
donors. Other examples include The Marshall Project, which covers
the US criminal justice system, the education-focused Chalkbeat, and
Inside Climate News. Other projects undertake more specialized
investigations, such as the Center for Responsive Politics, which
supports the website OpenSecrets.org, intended to expose the flows
of money in politics, and professing to uphold institutional values of
transparency and accountability journalism. With a team of some
twenty staffers, it receives a mix of large foundation support (Open
Society, Hewlett, etc.) along with individual contributions – totaling
almost $9 million from 2009 to 2015 (Birnbauer 2019).
One important source of support for non-profit journalism in recent
years has been the foundation world, and the implications of this
deserve special scrutiny, especially concerning editorial influence
from funding and its dependability for solving an institutional
problem. These supporters include major players such as Knight,
Open Society, and the Ford Foundation. A study of this kind of
support by the Shorenstein Center and Northeastern University
showed a total of $1.8 billion in grants between 2010 and 2015. That
figure still pales, however, in comparison to the gap left by the
decline of the daily newspaper industry (and over half of the support
went to already established public broadcasting outlets).
In documenting this trend, Birnbauer (2019) examines contributions
from 2009 to 2015 to sixty-two “non-profit accountability journalism
organizations.” Totals range from $33,000 raised by the most recent
entry, the Scalawag, focusing on southern politics and culture, to $78
million going to the leading recipient, ProPublica. Totaling almost
$500 million across this time to all outlets, the top five also included
the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public
Integrity, the Sunlight Foundation, and Mother Jones. From this
investigation, Birnbauer concludes that foundation support is crucial
to most of these outlets but can come with strings attached, and it
runs the risk of large donors moving on to other priorities – unless
they are convinced to regard journalism projects as something to
help sustain indefinitely, rather than just launch. Fundraisers will
continue to scramble to meet their budget requirements, unless they
can convert contributors into regular donors. Benson (2018) reviews
this funding landscape, particularly with the larger projects like The
Texas Tribune, MinnPost, and ProPublica, and also concludes that
foundations are not the complete answer. He finds that the large
foundations, which are staffed with cultural and corporate elites on
their boards and possess high cultural capital, tend to seek
sustainability for their causes and hope to wean recipients from
start-up support. Thus, they can’t be counted on long-term. They
also, according to Benson’s analysis, tend to favor a pro-corporate
outlook tailored to upper-middle-class sensibilities, which he deems
“quality news for quality audiences” (or elites supporting other
elites). Although a welcome source of support for many programs,
“pack philanthropy” means a few foundations dominate the scene in
giving to a narrow group of high-profile projects. And big
foundations tend to take a conservative strategy in contributing to
established organizations.
Philanthropy redirects public funds via favorable tax treatment, but
the financial flows are not transparent and remain unaccountable to
the public. Yet they wield tremendous influence over public policy
and help dictate journalistic priorities, even if they don’t necessarily
meddle in the ground-level reporting of issues. Big-philanthropy
support (e.g., from Bill Gates) for covering issues like poverty may be
welcomed by cash-starved newsrooms, but what stories are
supplanted by foundation priorities, and what are the opportunity
costs in chasing one issue in lieu of another? Foundations have their
own conflicts of interest, and allowing them to subsidize news
agendas in line with their ideological priorities is ultimately not the
only answer to the crisis. The Knight Foundation, for example, has
been a strong ally of journalism and a forward-looking advocate for
the information needs of communities, but there’s no guarantee that
other supporters will be equally in sync with institutional values.
Rising inequality and concentration of wealth gives greater voice to
fewer individuals, with little public control over their philanthropic
priorities. In this review of the future of institutional sustainability,
then, this means turning our attention to the public option.

The public option

If the commercial model has run into market failure, with users not
conditioned to pay for the news product, and with foundation
support no panacea, what about publicly funded media? Pickard
(2019) argues that, for journalism, market failure is a feature of
commercialism, not a bug – thus necessitating public options,
including more robust unions, anti-trust regulation, and community
governance for media. Historically, government support of media
has not been a seriously considered alternative in policy debates
dominated by the commercial media industry, especially in the US
compared to Europe. McChesney and Pickard (2014) have been
among those advocating most strongly for a public role in supporting
journalism – defined as a “public good” and not a business to be
evaluated on its economic performance – arguing that the market
clearly cannot support the kind of journalism democracy requires.
That doesn’t mean, however, that commercial media should be
replaced. Public service media can co-exist with commercial media,
and even play a leadership role in holding out an institutional
exemplar. The BBC, long a model for a form of public service
broadcasting, has been regularly attacked from predictable sources
(e.g., Rupert Murdoch) for undercutting their own commercial
products, or for performing a function best left to the marketplace,
but experience suggests that public media do not preclude market-
based competitors. Emily Bell argues that the entire media system
need not be publicly funded in order to have a positive ripple effect
from an investment in public media, and that a “thriving mixed
media economy tends to benefit everybody” (Hofseth 2018). In fact,
public media in some communities, which are actually growing their
staffs, have merged with digital non-profit newsrooms to provide
more robust leadership in local news. These new models are being
examined in the Public Media Merger project at the Shorenstein
Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy
School.
Significant public support has infiltrated the eco-system indirectly
through a lesser-known channel – publicly supported higher
education. In many communities the university student newsroom
has begun to step up to meet the local news deficit left by layoffs and
closures, in places like Ann Arbor and Chapel Hill, where the college
publication remains following the demise of the Ann Arbor News
and Chapel Hill News, and the University of Oklahoma, where the
staff size of the student-run Oklahoma Daily exceeds the still-
publishing Norman Transcript (Blatchford 2018). This pattern
coincides with the so-called “teaching hospital” model of journalism
education, where industry-oriented pundits have advocated that
college students work in real-world conditions with professionals,
and produce reporting suitable for professional outlets. That’s not a
bad idea on the face of it, but it still leaves one wondering how
students are being served for long-term employment if they’re being
taught by laid-off professionals from newspapers that no longer exist
to prepare for jobs that may no longer be there. Ultimately, this does
contribute (although not greatly) to the resources available to
journalism as a net-positive. In a more formal university-based
structure, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism is based
in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, which
provides space in its building in exchange for hiring student interns.
As an indication of its institutional identity, the Center predictably
came under attack from the conservative governor of Wisconsin, who
feared the Center’s agenda would not favor his political interests. The
effect of this trend overall has been to indirectly subsidize the
industry. In the case of public universities like my own, Texas
taxpayers have essentially underwritten the cost of some of its
journalism with free student labor. Such a state-supported subsidy
would be unthinkable by First Amendment absolutists if it involved a
more direct state transfer of resources to journalism, but perhaps it
has prepared the way to imagine other forms of public support.
Other ways to involve the government indirectly have also been
suggested. Media reform advocates on the left, for example, have
proposed taxing corporate media or allowing personal tax deductions
for contributions to non-profit media, but the means for transferring
this revenue and who would qualify are less well specified.

The platforms
The economics of journalism also run through the giant social media
platforms, which have become in just a few years a major
distribution channel for the news product, but are a decidedly mixed
blessing. For one thing, the seeming effortless abundance of
receiving news on these platforms has helped conceal for many
consumers the institutional underpinnings and true costs of the
product, and therefore further suppressed the motivation to pay for
it – not to mention the mixing of legitimate news with a deluge of
misinformation, further undermining media trust. Platforms like
Facebook and Twitter have tried to maintain a neutral information-
broker role but it’s inevitable that they must accept both the
connection they have with the institution and the need to contribute
economically to its survival. Benson and Pickard (2017), in
advocating a more aggressive commitment to public service, even
argue for taxing companies like Facebook to support journalism
through an independent journalism trust fund. The Media Reform
Coalition in Britain, for example, has promoted a 1 percent charge on
the largest intermediaries to fund local non-profit ventures
producing original news reporting. Although the libertarian tradition
of the technology sector is at odds with the idea of this taxation, the
concentration of power in these intermediaries makes one of the
major causes of journalism’s problems also a logical place to look for
the solution. Amazon has for years been siphoning off vast amounts
of tax revenue from retail stores in local communities, leading them
to begin claiming back some of that lost revenue – and the argument
for a similar dynamic with journalism may now make more sense to
those bereft of their local newsgathering. Certainly, the platforms are
more politically vulnerable than ever before, as their power attracts
the attention of policy-makers from across the spectrum, with
conservatives, suspicious of journalism to begin with, convinced they
are being disadvantaged by liberal-minded digital gatekeepers.
Critics on the left, on the other hand, have been less likely to
emphasize gatekeeper bias, favoring instead a more systemic role for
the platforms in funding journalism – assuming they can agree on
what would qualify as deserving of that support.
Silicon Valley’s traditional libertarian and anti-institutional streak,
however, has shunned attempted regulation efforts. Founding
member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, John Perry Barlow,
wrote a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996,
which expressed this resistance to government: “In our world,
whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and
distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no
longer requires your factories to accomplish.” Mark Zuckerberg has
resisted efforts to have Facebook exercise more control over speech
on the platform, arguing in a speech at Georgetown University that
“People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new
kind of force in the world – a Fifth Estate alongside the other power
structures of society.”14 So, Zuckerberg has a dilemma: needing to
acknowledge that his company has become the elephant in the room,
as a threat to a healthy public sphere, but doing so would mean
accepting liability for the platform’s influence. The scale of
disinformation on Facebook-owned WhatsApp, for example, prior to
the 2018 presidential election in Brazil, was such that the vice-
president of WhatsApp was quoted in a Brazilian newspaper
acknowledging that “we have a responsibility to amplify the good and
mitigate the harm” (Isaac and Roose 2018). This idea, however, that
cyberspace is somehow a space apart from political institutions now
must confront the important ways that large technology platforms
are implicated in supporting more dangerous anti-institutional
extremism. The spread of misinformation need not always be
malicious, but it can flow through smaller, more intimate networks,
through overlapping circles of trust, as in the case of WhatsApp, a
wildly popular platform in Brazil, India, and other countries where
access to more reliable sources of information is more limited.
Experiments have shown, however, that platform tweaks can cut the
velocity of unfounded and potentially deadly rumors (Manjoo 2018).
Google, for example, cannot easily claim to be only “search,” since
buying YouTube. The enormously popular video-sharing platform
has become one of the most important political platforms in Brazil,
with its algorithms connecting together and amplifying extremist
voices, radicalizing political elements on the right that previously
were a marginalized minority. YouTube’s recommendation system,
designed to maximize watch-time, drives viewers to ever more
extreme content than they would otherwise seek. The platform is
even credited with helping elevate an authoritarian leader, Jair
Bolsonaro, to the presidency, and his supporters in turn are
exploiting YouTube to pressure other institutions on his behalf in
order to consolidate power (Fisher and Taub 2019).
As a defensive maneuver, Facebook and Google have taken steps to
down-grade hyper-partisan news sites like Western Journalism (now
Journal) for misleading information, leading to a predictable charge
that these giant tech platforms are biased against conservatives. That
kind of pressure led Facebook to commission its own audit in 2019,
with a report prepared by a former Republican senator, which found
no evidence of anti-conservative bias. Of course, whatever bias may
be perceived is a systemically generated rather than partisan
outcome, because the platforms adopted criteria favoring sites
playing by journalistic rules and penalizing those found to be less
reliable. And hyper-partisan sites are more likely to be found on the
right of the political spectrum. If WesternJournal, for example,
claims to be a news site aspiring to reporting the truth, with the
trappings of a corrections policy and copyeditors on staff, one could
consider it just a conservative form of journalism. So, what is the
distinction? Compared with journals of conservative opinion that
develop ideas, and support policies derived from those ideas, hyper-
partisan sites push narratives designed for political attack and
emotional outrage, not ideological refinement. Thus, in this case the
platforms are taking important steps to align themselves with the
institutional press – relying on the verdicts of news fact-checking
operations, for example, to guide algorithm decision-making and
downgrade sources of misinformation.
Google declares itself to be an internet search firm, but that
smokescreen obscures the fact that a search engine, like social
media, operates on algorithms arbitrating the news distribution
stream. Search drives traffic to news sites and has supported
institutional journalism to the extent its algorithms promote original
reporting, sacrificing short-term clicks for long-term credibility.15
Google provides advertising tools and training to publishers, but also
creates a dependency of news organizations on a potentially
capricious partner, even while it sucks up a vast amount of revenue
that would otherwise be available to publishers. Vice-president for
news at Google, Richard Gingras, claims that collaboration with
news organizations will be the key to quality journalism and that
Google has done more than anyone.16 But Google has not given back
anything close to the value it has extracted from the journalism
industry, and the concentration of gatekeeping power and associated
revenue streams into the hands of a single private corporation, no
matter how benign it may present itself as being, threatens
journalistic independence.

Conclusion
In terms of funding models, journalism will require an all-of-the-
above approach, an eclectic mix of organized efforts, but each of the
potential economic solutions has its problems. Commercial revenue
has not been robust, and readers have shown limited willingness to
pay for journalism directly, although the value proposition in recent
years has been communicated more clearly. Meanwhile, the
increasing donations to compelling projects that follow institutional
values are encouraging. Foundation support comes with strings
attached and concerns over whether it will be available long-term to
sustain newsgathering, so the solution cannot be left to Big
Philanthropy. Although public media have not been a significant part
of the US media mix, conservative partisans, seeing them as a liberal
hotbed, have sought to reduce their already modest funding levels.
The platform companies, with their deep pockets and powerful
lobbying apparatus, will continue to resist anything that smacks of
regulation or taxation, but as an institutional partner the cause of
journalism deserves their support.
Even if they agree to some form of revenue sharing, however, the
difficulty will lie in determining which news organizations are
entitled to the reclaimed revenue. The institutional criteria for such a
determination are, however, beginning to come into view. Is James
O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, which claims to carry out journalism but is
clearly anti-institutional, entitled to support from a journalism trust
fund funded by a platform tax? I would argue not, but how is O’Keefe
to be distinguished from what I would regard as more worthy
journalistic initiatives? Transparency must play a role as an
institutional value. Although he has non-profit status, O’Keefe is
opaque about how money is spent and does not disclose his donors,
but according to a ThinkProgress investigation of disclosures to the
government tax authority, they include more than a million dollars
from funds linked to the Koch brothers and supported by other
conservative activists. (Smaller donors, not unexpectedly, included
the Trump Foundation.)17
Through the different forms of support for journalism – state,
foundation, subscriber, and commercial – we need to find the
institutional thread as a guide to identifying where it is best
supported. Some form of journalistic enterprise can surely be
sustained across these domains, but does the resulting field hang
together with shared values and operate with a sense of shared
purpose? The social purpose of the now hybrid institution is to
provide an independent means of truth and trustworthy points of
view, with a civic focus, non-partisan alignment, a transparent
system of practices, and truth as the primary goal. In each case,
public understanding and support for the institutional press will be
necessary to move policy in the right direction. On an optimistic
note, one can observe that the economic crisis for journalism and the
anti-institutional attacks on the press have provided a clarifying
moment. They have forced a reckoning regarding the institution,
leading to a deconflation of industry practices and the economic
model, and obliging both traditional organizations and start-up
projects to state their value proposition more clearly. This is
particularly clear with subscriber-based models, where the cost of
news is no longer hidden inside a product supported by advertising,
and the case for deserving individual support has to be articulated.
Thus, this is an opportunity to reassess the social value of
journalism, defining institutional practices according to that value,
rather than with respect to a specific news organization or industry.
If the institution has social value, citizens should be willing to
support it, either by paying for it directly through memberships and
subscriptions, indirectly through taxes and government subsidies, or
in supporting changes in other public policy incentives. I turn in the
next and final chapter to this question of social values and the
normative concerns surrounding the institutional press.

Notes
1 “New York Times Gets Subscriber ‘bump’ Ahead of U.S. Election,
Shares Hit 15-Year High,” Reuters, February 6, 2020,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-york-times-
results/new-york-times-gets-subscriber-bump-ahead-of-u-s-
election-shares-hit-15-year-high-idUSKBN2001N6.
2 See http://www.digitalnewsreport.org.
3 “Bustle Digital, the Company That Bought Gawker and Mic, has
Acquired the Outline,” Vox, March 27, 2019,
https://www.vox.com/2019/3/27/18284591/bustle-outline-
bryan-goldberg-josh-topolsky-digital-media-acquisition.
4 See https://www.usnewsdeserts.com.
5 “Mimicking Local News, a Network of Michigan Websites Pushes
Politics,” New York Times, October 21, 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/us/michigan-metric-
media-news.html.
6 “Baby Breitbarts to Pop Up Across the Country?,” Politico, April
30, 2015, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/30/breitbart-
tennessee-fake-news-560670.
7 “Mediapart Guarantees its Future Independence,” Mediapart,
July 2, 2019,
https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/020719/mediapart-
guarantees-its-future-independence?_locale=en&onglet=full.
8 “The Guardian Announces the Launch of a New US Nonprofit to
Support Story-Telling and Independent Journalism,” Guardian,
August 28, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-
office/2017/aug/28/the-guardian-announces-the-launch-of-a-
new-us-nonprofit-to-support-story-telling-and-independent-
journalism.
9 See https://correctiv.org/en.
10 Panel at the International Symposium for Online Journalism,
Austin, Texas, April 22, 2017.
11 See https://www.lionpublishers.com/membership-criteria.
12 “Here’s an Idea to Save Local News: Stop Trying to Make a
Profit from Local News,” Vox, February 13, 2020,
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/13/21135166/local-news-
 nonprofit-plan-john-thornton-american-journalism-texas-
tribune-recode-media-peter-kafka.
13 See http://www.theajp.org.
14 “Defiant Zuckerberg Says Facebook Won’t Police Political
Speech,” New York Times, October 17, 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/business/zuckerberg-
facebook-free-speech.html.
15 “Google Says a Change in Its Algorithm Will Highlight ‘Original
Reporting,’” New York Times, September 12, 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/business/media/google-
algorithm-original-reporting.html.
16 “Toward a Healthy and Sustainable Future for Journalism,”
Medium, October 10, 2019,
https://medium.com/@richardgingras/toward-a-healthy-and-
sustainable-future-for-journalism-922462f4a84e.
17 “Meet the People Bankrolling James O’Keefe’s Group,” Think
Progress, November 29, 2017, See
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/project-veritas-funding-
2e4ef0319195/.
7
Aspirations for the Institution
With this chapter I conclude with a discussion of the way forward,
emphasizing the values and normative framework that should guide
our questions about journalism and its institutional form. In the face
of the crisis framed by this volume’s title, I don’t want to be
complacent about the threats, but I would prefer to end on a more
optimistic note. This requires focusing on the normative part of the
definition of the institution offered by Huntington (1968):
“Institutions are stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior.” I
suggested a similar definition that emphasizes how the institution, as
a complex social structure, works together “to sustain its coherence,
endurance, and value.” Institutions are important, more important
than ever in this particular season of political life, but what is it more
precisely we want them to do? What exactly is it about the
institution, however configured, that we do value? We may be able to
theorize about what makes them stable, as an empirical question and
as a social fact, but what makes us want them to be stable as
“patterns of behavior,” valued in democratic societies, and thus likely
to become, remain, and be deemed institutionalized? We value
institutions to the extent that they serve a crucial social purpose, but
how well do they perform against our expectations? In that sense,
which aspects of the institutional press should survive, which are
being reconfigured outside of the traditional organizational settings,
and which may safely be allowed to expire and become de-
institutionalized? Whatever its faults, the press matters greatly as a
defense against repressive power, by providing a stabilizing and
structured consensus on how to conduct its “institutionally organized
civic skepticism,” valued for its “routine exercise of scrutiny over
political elites and powerful institutions in the public’s interest”
(Kreiss 2016: 62). Hopeful signs are on the horizon if we look more
broadly at the emerging hybrid institution. In the context of its
Journalism Innovation Project, the Reuters Institute, for example,
has tracked the work of Global South outlets that I touched on
earlier: The Rappler in the Philippines, The Daily Maverick in South
Africa, and The Quint, in India.1 In spite of their different national
contexts, they share the challenge of combatting particularly chronic
levels of misinformation, but these commercial, digital-native
organizations together demonstrate a clear sense of journalistic
mission, which allows them to find innovative ways to resist
government pressure on press freedom and actively rebut false
information (Posetti, Simon, and Shabbir 2019).
Although its legitimacy is based on its moral role in civic life, the
endurance of the journalistic institution and the consensus on which
it is based are not guaranteed, nor is it always clear how it should
best organize its skepticism or what is in the public’s interest. It’s not
that normative theories have not considered the duty of the press
(e.g., Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm 1956), but those theories have
approached the press as a unitary actor, as a profession or media
system. They have a hard time accommodating the populist attacks
on the media, which fall outside traditional ideas about press and
state. Indeed, to the extent that one part of the media eco-system is
based on delegitimating another, rejecting an ethos of verification
and self-policing, it’s hard to regard it as part of the institutional
press. That has become especially evident when considering the
counter-institutional media: right-wing, alt-right, or other
contributors, who are willing to spread misinformation in order to
advance their goals. Normative values serve to differentiate among
institutional pretenders. Some players follow rules antithetical to a
healthy civic dialog based on transparency and self-reflective
accountability, and to that extent are counter-institutional (and, in
fact, have become more attached to elements of the political
institution). For example, a monthly magazine devoted to Jewish
issues, The Forward, documented the rise of the anti-Semitism
embraced by the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer. Although both are
special interest advocates with values guiding their expression, The
Forward identifies with the institutional press and its rules (“We’re
journalists first on this job”), while the Stormer presumably does not
(Peiser 2017). Civic skepticism, a normative goal for journalism,
presumably does not include cynical trolling and the delegitimizing
of systems of truth-seeking.
The rapidly evolving media landscape, however, requires taking a
perspective that acknowledges the urgency of the threat and
encompasses the full and more complex range of institutional actors.
Developments in digital journalism brought hopes for greater public
engagement with news, but as Kreiss and Brennan (2016: 310) argue,
the normative conversation in this field has become “too one-sided,”
with an “uncritical embrace of participation, de-institutionalization,
innovation, and entrepreneurialism,” without considering the
important role and responsibility of the institutional press. This
would involve engaging the normative dimension more directly, as
the messy proliferation of new journalistic forms makes institutional
values more problematic and brings them into sharper relief. Even
the giant digital platforms, most prominently Facebook and Google,
have in their own way inadvertently provoked renewed interest in
normative expectations. These companies have been forced by public
and political pressure to reckon with their own role in relation to the
institutional press, from which they draw so much revenue. As
crucial intermediaries, their opaque algorithmic predomination over
human judgment has already damaged institutional trust. Each
decision these companies make is loaded with normative
implications. In 2014, for example, Google began including non-
news sites in its “in the news” feature, leading to dubious sources of
information surfacing in the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas mass
shooting. It was reported that 4chan, a disinformation fixture in the
right-wing eco-system, showed up when users were seeking
information about the shooter, with Facebook returning similar
questionable results (Madrigal 2017). The irony is that Facebook
weathered another controversy over human judgment, revealing bias
against certain conservative themes, but in both cases the issue was
lack of transparency about the process and basis for selection.
The dissatisfaction with traditional journalism, commercialism’s
corruption of its mission, counter-institutional attacks on
mainstream media, the market failure of local news, and the need in
start-up culture to make the case for new projects have all obliged us
to more clearly articulate the values of journalism and bring them
into the policy arena. That requires a more explicitly aspirational
view of journalism among those who conduct empirical research in
this area, not leaving it to the students of press law and ethics, areas
that are more narrowly focused on the profession as traditionally
defined. Identifying the real aspirational values requires a
normatively engaged approach to journalism studies that takes the
institution seriously. This is what I understand Witschge and
colleagues to be saying in their recent work, cited in Chapter 5: that
we need to be more explicit about our moral ideals for the future of
journalism and the institution supporting it (Witschge et al. 2018).
In their reflection on the messiness of the hybrid turn, they caution
against starting with the same kind of assumptions as before, but
how are these more complicated institutional hybrid combinations
shaping up against any kind of normative expectations? We can
witness efforts from within the profession to protect and rebuild the
institution, and these should be recognized and encouraged, but that
rebuilding will not be confined to the profession itself. A more
explicit advocacy on behalf of journalism is under way, expressed in
the discourses surrounding these movements, such as fact-checking
and non-profit news, to improve (and in doing so save) the field and
to advance journalism’s democratic mission. As I noted earlier, this
opens the door to a broader array of actors not traditionally regarded
as part of the institution.

A normative journalism studies

Before proceeding further, some clarification is in order, because any
discussion of norms can become confusing, given how differently
that concept is deployed. In a general sense, norms are those shared
societal beliefs and expectations about how members should behave
and how things ought to be. “Norms of reasonableness,” for example,
set general expectations of institutional participants, which are
necessary in allowing them to interact and accomplish their goals,
but those kinds of norms have been shown to be more dispensable
than once thought. The lessons of the twentieth century and of the
present political climate underscore the fragility of the norms
holding institutions together. Trump is obviously a great norm
violator in his political behavior and handling of the press, and
previously observed practices like press conferences and releasing
tax returns have been revealed for what they were – norms about
what a president should do, not what he must do – and are easily
transgressed. In evaluating the hybrid institution, I use normative in
yet another sense to refer to the explicit judgments, an observer’s
normative assessments, about how well things are working at a
societal level. In journalism studies this kind of analysis has not been
as commonly invoked, and I can think of at least two reasons why.
When the news media were more self-evidently identifiable, research
focused on the professional practices and workings of the news
industry, without speaking to the democratic functioning of the
larger institution, which was always assumed. Democracy requires
informed citizens, and to the extent that news media were assumed
to contribute to that, journalism was regarded as an obvious social
good. That’s the premise on which much of the field has been based,
confirmed in the finding, for example, that attention to news
correlates with virtuous outcomes in terms of civic participation. In
journalism’s high-modern period of the 1960s and ’70s, the stable
alignment of mutual dependencies among commercial and
professional needs produced a sense that the institution was working
correctly and fulfilling its value to society. Those kinds of taken-for-
granted, normative expectations now seem up for grabs, causing us
to ask more explicitly, and tentatively, how well the institutional
press is serving democratic needs and buffering against illiberal
threats to the system. If journalists once took their professional value
as a given, that must give way now to more explicit institutional
concerns for how they engage with the wider democratic world.
Many of the reformist recommendations for the profession have
involved just doing a better journalistic job – better use of data,
better expertise brought to reporting, more entrepreneurial
innovation in the newsroom – leading to a system-maintaining
mentality, or what Kreiss (2016) calls an “administrative journalism”
that neglects the larger conversation around civic values. Performing
better in these areas can hardly be expected to be the primary means
of winning the trust of an increasingly skeptical public. Journalism’s
institutional value must be primarily justified on a moral basis,
because those are the values most under populist attack.
Another reason for this neglect of normative benchmarking lies in
how the institution has been conceptualized. The institutionalist
view, as this review has suggested, is from a theoretical standpoint
values-agnostic, in the sense that it asks how problems are solved
and needs addressed. Norms in this context are not the kind that
emerge from a moral position, and at the extreme can look like no
more than a cynical ploy. They are a sociological feature of the
system being investigated: a marker of struggle over a self-interested
profession in a jurisdictional dispute, as something journalists hold
up to cover their real interests, or as a way to build cultural capital.
Professionals invoke norms as a social resource, used to form
interpretive communities, to engage in boundary work and paradigm
repair, and to perform strategic rituals to defend themselves from
outsiders and public criticism. Occupational norms of journalistic
balance, detachment, objectivity, and even the inverted-pyramid
style of writing are professional practices, which have become
institutionalized because they are useful in helping ensure legitimacy
and survival. Organizations seek to solve problems – not democratic
problems but practical problems of ensuring their own self-
preservation. Working back inductively from empirical observation,
as many studies do, risks the functionalist fallacy, that what is must
be serving a valuable function, reducing uncertainty and solving
other problems. And it must be valuable if it has endured for so long.
The functional relevance of these practices, however, does not speak
to the kind of larger principles that make journalism vital to society.
The institution may be functionally explainable but may not be the
best from an aspirational standpoint. That kind of normative
discussion takes place on a broader level and requires some explicit
moral preferences – that democracy is good, for example, and that
injustice is bad. Certainly, there are broad visions of how the press
should best operate embedded in normative theories, which include
social responsibility, authoritarian, and libertarian frameworks that
draw from philosophical traditions about how society should best be
organized. This is the kind of normativity I am referring to here, not
only in the abstract but in evaluating specific institutional features. If
research has emphasized norms as a sociological feature, I am
thinking here of what is institutionally normative. That is, what
value judgments can be made about how well things are working,
guided by clear normative criteria? Although critical theory has
taken a more explicit moral stance in this respect, based on a theory
of society, these questions bring a social science of journalism closer
to a subjective posture than has characterized its tradition. So, what
are the normative criteria? A good place to start would involve asking
how new hybrid configurations contribute to institutional
independence, transparency, accountability, fairness, and self-
reflexivity, creating the possibility of self-correction. As research
becomes more global and comparative opportunities proliferate, they
reveal that the normative expectations so taken for granted in one
society are not necessarily shared in others, making them more
problematic.

The new assemblages

Even as we’re “blowing up the newsroom” in a methodological sense
(Anderson 2011), emerging structures can still work toward
strengthening institutionality. Assessing this outcome goes beyond
simple media criticism. Barbie Zelizer has advocated something
along these lines, in warning about the risks to media around the
world, arguing that journalism should be examined with its strengths
and weaknesses as it practically exists today, rather than how it
ought to exist in some ideal: “If there were ever a time to realign the
abstract ideals proclaiming journalism’s value with its less than
perfect ground conditions, that time is now.”2 We can’t reject an
institution without having something to replace it with, as many in
the trolling culture seem willing to do. But without ignoring its faults
or abandoning scientific rigor we can identify those institutional
structures that support the values we aspire for it to serve. In
extending Schudson’s work, Nielsen proposes a realist’s expectation
of what journalism should do, arguing that only journalism is
uniquely situated to “inform the public,” that is, to provide “relatively
accurate, accessible, diverse, relevant, timely, independently
produced” information (2017: 1259). This may be what journalism
should do, but how does it perform against these expectations?
That’s still an open question, but we can look for answers in the
wide-ranging networked configurations and dynamic assemblages
underlying the hybrid institution. We need a way to think more
clearly about this kind of press performance.
In his conceptualization of network press freedom, Ananny (2018)
moves away from more traditional liberal notions of freedom from
the state toward the idea that it should be free to combine into new
forms. His idea of the public’s “right to hear” makes this a more
proactive and normatively dynamic view of freedom, one that
emphasizes a collective determination of whether a press structure
works to benefit the public. The press naturally defends its rights,
but the public has rights too, according to Ananny, to hear things
that will help it be a better public – and on that basis decide what is
institutionally optimal. That differs from the traditional laissez-faire
reasoning, and the cyber-libertarianism of Silicon Valley, which
assumes the public good will work out for the best if the press is just
left alone, and therefore any concerns over the specifics of that public
good are only indirectly relevant to policy. The marketplace model,
which has typified American media, emphasizes the citizen as
consumer but has not ensured the rights of citizens to receive what
they need. And the freedom-from view of the press does not have
much to say about market failure and, as fervently articulated by
giant technology companies, has given rise to conspiracy theories
and disinformation, failing to meet the public’s right to hear. That
view has impeded a full reckoning with normative concerns.
Freedom to do investigative journalism, as Ananny (2018) observes,
depends on having safe socio-technical practices. So, press
legitimacy rests to a significant degree on its engaging appropriately
with the technological infrastructure to make sure the public receives
what it needs. In this view, press autonomy is a network property of
the press infrastructure, deemed to be a system of “separations and
dependencies,” a “loosely coupled array of standardized elements”
that combines to produce an institution. I take Ananny to be saying
something similar to my own view – that networked freedom is a
freedom for journalism to do something new, to enter into a variety
of relationships, which must be judged in their totality according to
normative principles. Rather than emphasize what journalists and
consumers of news do as a strictly descriptive, sociological task, we
might better ask what the embedded structures of power are that
may or may not produce democratically valuable and system-
functional outcomes.
As I’ve discussed, research on the broader normative questions of
journalism has focused until now largely on the traditional news
media and professional press corps, but this “media and society”
perspective targeted an underspecified and unproblematic
institution that emphasized homogeneity and stability, overstating
institutional coherence and normative consensus. The hybrid media
system, characterized by more fluid boundaries, does not allow for
the same clearly delineated organizational structure and normative
theories as before. Journalism’s market failure in many communities
has provoked clear normative concerns for civic health, but even
there the press extends beyond this traditional base. I’ve tried to
suggest a diverse range of realignments within this new hybrid
institution, at both the macro and practice level, which are available
for this normative recalculation. Each of the hybrid developments I
explored in Chapter 5 has implications for strengthening the
institution in a democratically positive direction, even if the precise
normative criteria still need to be better specified.
Other writers have also pointed out that journalism is not a fixed
entity or confined to stable institutional units, but is spread across
networks, collaborations, situations, and projects (e.g., Deuze and
Witschge 2018). But what are we to make of this plethora of new
start-ups and experimentations? Do they coalesce around something
meaningful and normatively desirable? Practice-level studies have
been concerned with specific journalistic procedures (e.g., the
interview, sourcing), but just as important are the values that
become accepted, shared, and supported by those structures,
establishing a healthy, moral, and civic-focused institutional center.
Promoting journalistic authority was simpler when the institution
was more clearly defined and hierarchical, when there was a more
tangible media entity and leadership class to criticize or champion,
but what about now? What logic transcends the multitude of
contingent interactions comprising a hybrid media system that holds
the members of a network together? In thinking of the institution in
these terms, in seeking institutionality across a variety of networked
assemblages, larger normative issues become visible at different
levels, as suggested by the typology introduced earlier.

The global press infrastructure

Normative theories have been typically rooted in national political
contexts, but we need increasingly to have these conversations more
globally. We need to give more attention to those cross-national
linkages that help support institutional resilience, structures that are
organized around a healthy civic skepticism. This includes
collaborative international reporting projects around large-scale data
leaks from activists and international press advocates, who help
articulate institutional values. Reporters Without Borders, for
example, has created a commission to lead the call for a “pledge on
information and democracy,” with an emphasis on verification,
ethics, editorial independence, and transparency. The commission’s
report preamble, “Global Communication and Information Space: A
Common Good of Humankind,” takes an infrastructural position that
emphasizes, not just the need to protect journalists as such, but the
structure of the larger journalistic space: “The communication and
information space must be organized in such a way as to allow rights
and democracy to be exercised. It should … guarantee the freedom,
independence and pluralism of news and information. As a common
good, this space has social, cultural and democratic value and should
not be reduced to its commercial dimension alone.”3
Of course, not all social movements are organized around the same
institutional values, but most are connected in one form or another
to global networks, which cut more than one way. For example, a
populist anti-mainstream-media discourse has grown to take on a
transnational quality, but it’s unclear how far other aspects of
nationalist ideology can be globalized (rooted as they are in national
contexts), or whether a parallel counter-institutional structure will
develop to support them. This is the dark side of social movements
empowered by connective action, with white nationalists seeking
each other out to share common purpose and best practices. On a
more visible level, Breitbart’s Steve Bannon himself travels widely,
conferring with populist leaders in Europe and elsewhere, sharing
best practices and guiding new alt-right media franchises. Ethno-
nationalism has gone international, with a highly networked
movement that includes its own media system, creating a global
interconnectedness ironically developed to exploit and connect those
feeling left out of “the Net.”
Not all responses to global forces are reactionary, however, and
social movements must be acknowledged for their normative
concerns about, for example, rapacious capitalism, social inequality,
hyper-militarization, environmental degradation, and human rights
abuses. This is another, often underplayed, face of global
cosmopolitanism, and it’s not necessarily an elite face, as Castells
implies. These advocates of international cooperation and liberal
values find common cause and form global communities, made
possible through cross-border connectivity. As a counter-movement
to the global trend of state suppression of media and journalists,
Keeble (2019) points to a host of media activities offering a
progressive alternative to the corporate media. He argues that these
sites, such as counterpunch.org, johnpilger.com, or anti-war.com,
make a significant contribution to the global public sphere. These are
globally connected voices, which although often found on the
political left make common cause with groups like the Committee for
the Protection of Journalists, advocating for larger institutional
values in fighting corruption and organized crime, and challenging
the lies of repressive states. In any case, by moving beyond the
newsroom or the trans-organizational, meso-level field, we can
better consider and evaluate these developments.

Critic and champion

When it comes to making normative judgments, academic research
has been better at being press critic than press champion. As
reviewed earlier, there is no shortage of social science-based media
critiques, with Big Media a big target. The media reform advocates,
rooted in a political economy tradition, have developed the most
pointed normative argument – that at the root of it all the
commercial model of journalism has hopelessly corrupted its public
service mission. McChesney has contributed a number of such
critiques, beginning in the late 1980s, with books like Rich Media,
Poor Democracy (2000) from the early digital era, arguing that the
corporate media system has become so naturalized and ingrained
that little energy has been devoted within the academic field to
alternatives. Around the same time, serious professional observers
mounted their own critique, but many still operated from within the
taken-for-granted commercial media system. Former Washington
Post editors Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser’s book from 2002,
The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril, found
shortcomings around the coverage of specific issues, but generally
admonished journalists to do better journalism, and by doing so be
more commercially successful. Both perspectives, from inside and
outside the profession, reflected the times in their focus on the
commercial media system. But they did not account for the variety of
new forms that have brought normative concerns back to the table.
That’s where academic research can now play a stronger role as press
champion. There are many experiments, and not just in the non-
profit sector, which provide opportunities to discover what’s working
according to clear normative criteria, and better understand why.
Without being an apologist for the media or unscientific, it is
possible to better couple our understanding of press theory with
practice. One has often come without the other, but that is no longer
sustainable.
Journalists themselves are obliged to rethink many of their
professional norms and routines. In her analysis of communication
around climate change, for example, Callison argues that groups
involved in the issue, whether Arctic zone peoples or religious groups
organized around earth stewardship, integrate the facts and
information around the science into their moral codes and ethical
frameworks. A journalism sensitive to that process, she argues,
should, rather than try to convey the scientific consensus more
accurately, report in such a way that “the substantiation of facts leads
to ethical questions and not more questions about the facts” (2014:
85). Academic observers could take a page from this argument and
work on doing the same.
Citizens need to be better educated about the importance of the
press, not because professional journalism has been blameless, but
because we should have expectations of what constitutes a good
society and know how institutions can help sustain it. Media literacy
initiatives have been widespread since the 1960s, but they have often
been too narrow in either offering critiques of Big Media or, in the
digital era that followed, celebrating citizen, self-made media culture.
Citizens should be empowered to tell their own stories, as is made
possible by new media, but that will not substitute for a robust
institutional press that can draw together and amplify those stories
and give them greater impact. More specifically, news literacy efforts
have not been fully adequate, with their often reactionary defense of
the traditional profession, or providing simple formulas for
identifying bias (e.g., Stony Brook University’s Center for News
Literacy). France has been particularly aggressive in promoting news
literacy in classrooms, with the government partnering with
educators and journalists, and in some cases even withholding
welfare benefits to adults without the required training.4 But even
such a well-funded program cannot compete with the massive
production of disinformation via platforms. A broader vision of the
hybrid institution is needed, and of the values that set it apart from
the counter-institution and extremist outlets – not as an
oversimplified knee-jerk defense, which has often typified the
profession-originated initiatives, but as a response based on a
broader normative and institutional framework.

Conclusion
In this volume I have tried to take the threat to the institutional press
seriously, by attempting to understand why there is such widespread
antagonism – particularly as articulated through a populist voice.
That kind of outrage has been sufficient to spawn an entirely
separate right-wing media eco-system, which operates as a counter-
institution in communicating mainly within itself. Regardless of
what happens in upcoming elections, Donald Trump has tapped into
serious grievances, some legitimate and others manufactured. His
electoral success has revealed what people are capable of and how
fragile norms can be, and it will be difficult to put the genie back in
the bottle. Trump will eventually go away, but Trumpism will not
leave anytime soon. As discussed earlier, some observers, such as
Schudson, offer an optimistic prognosis about the prospects for
democratic institutions, but I agree with Waisbord (2017) that the
populist moment will severely test such expectations.
We need to better understand the nature of institutions and the
existential threats to them, and clarify the reasons why they are such
valuable parts of any organized social system. Although often applied
loosely, I have explicated the concept of the institution to better
understand how it has been engaged at both the level of newsroom
practice and within the larger journalistic field, often with the effect
of discounting the potential threat to its endurance and deflecting
attention away from new developments in the hybrid media system.
Institutions are stable structures by definition, but we need a better
understanding of what contributes to that stability and causes them
to be valued, and not take these outcomes for granted.
The public has good reason to distrust the media and journalism,
and social science approaches to journalism have not been able to
fully grapple with the threat of institutional corruption, both media
and political. Academic observers themselves have been conflicted,
but the public is ready for institutional and media reform, even if it
can’t give precise form to its desires, which have been channeled in
dysfunctional directions. In defending the press, an oversimplified
professional-apologist program of news literacy is not the answer,
especially in helping to identify institutional blind spots and the
kinds of reform that are called for.
The hybrid institution has taken on new forms beyond the traditional
news organization, which has led me to rethink where the institution
still lies in the myriad new networks and assemblages where
journalism happens, and how it can be identified in the essential
values that characterize this form of civic skepticism. Institutional
coherence has broken down and must be found in other places,
including in new connections among traditional news organizations
as well as with new ad hoc forms of investigation outside the
profession.
The business of the institution is still in a state of transition, and
finding a sustainable economic solution to the news crisis is perhaps
the most difficult challenge. The twin shocks of populist threat and
market failure have helped re-energize the conversation about
institutional values, especially in the many experiments in the non-
profit sector around the world. If the public is to be asked to support
newsgathering, whether directly through financial contributions or
indirectly through tax-supported government media subsidies, the
value proposition of journalism must be made more compelling. Big
media firms have been successful in fending off government
regulation, but the rise of the giant digital intermediaries has begun
to force the policy debate, given their financial threat to the
sustainability of accountability journalism.
Finally, I revisited the normative approach that must be brought to
institutional analysis, one that has not been typical of journalism
studies. The institution is valued, by definition, but what values are
most valued? Norms are not just conventions that journalists
espouse to defend their professional jurisdiction – they are also
standards of press performance that must be more carefully invoked
to evaluate new hybrid institutional structures. What are the
problems confronting democracy, and what journalistic institutional
assemblages are best able to address them? An aspirational view now
seems more timely in considering what we want this structured set of
ongoing practices to accomplish for society. This is no time for us to
be passive, but rather to articulate and defend our aspirations for the
institution. The institutional press still matters, and that argument
must be communicated to the public that depends on it.

Notes
1 See https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/research/jour-
nalism-innovation-project.
2 See https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/annenberg-
video/culture-and-communication-videos-faculty-videos/al-
jazeera-putting.
3 “Global Communication and Information Space: A Common
Good of Humankind,” RSF Reporters Without Borders,
https://rsf.org/en/global-communication-and-information-
space-common-good-humankind.
4 “In France, School Lessons Ask: Which Twitter Post Should You
Trust?,” New York Times, December 13, 2008,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/technology/france-
internet-literacy-school.html?searchResultPosition=10.
Epilogue
I finished this manuscript at about the same time the coronavirus
pandemic was descending on my community, driving us all away
from the university campus and launching a surreal period of major
disruption and strict social distancing. I have not had enough
intellectual distance on this experience to incorporate any deeper
systematic insights into these pages, but the upheaval is too great to
ignore altogether – hence this brief note. The spreading disease has
illustrated in a new form globalization’s intensification of worldwide
relationships, tracking the same international social pathways that
I’ve benefited from as a mobile academic professional. To my other
intellectual interests in that dynamic of globalization, including
security and environmental issues, I’ve now reluctantly added this
experience with public health. Much will be written in the years to
come about this unprecedentedly broad threat to our well-being, but
some lessons are already clear. We need a reliable media system that
connects the public to sources of expertise and credible information.
These are needs that transcend national systems. China’s early
experience with the virus showed how quickly an authoritarian
government could mobilize against the threat, but also how precious
time was wasted by a lack of transparency, preventing early medical
experience and warnings from being freely communicated, out of
fear of punishment for spreading “rumors.” Other more
institutionalized accountability structures, including journalism,
have also been weakened in President Xi’s drive to consolidate power
and restrict civil society.
For all its political differences with China, the US faced similar
difficulties in responding to the pandemic, hampered by the
degraded state of government and other institutional authority,
coupled with a polarized public, showing the unfortunate fruits of the
post-truth era. Having built his entire political strategy on attacking
expertise and the press, President Trump was ill-prepared for such a
crisis, whose solution depends on both. I hope public appreciation
for expertise, knowledge, and statesmanship will be renewed, and
that this will all hasten the attempt to address the challenges facing
the press that I’ve tried to engage with in this volume, making the
case for a healthy institutional journalism. Some new hybrid
institutional developments have already responded to the great need,
including, for example, the COVID Tracking Project. With its roots in
a legacy media organization, The Atlantic, the volunteer journalism-
technology initiative has gathered and published data, not otherwise
readily available, to promote greater transparency and help news
organizations and other groups better understand the issues.
According to its website, “Since early March 2020, we have grown
from a tiny team with a spreadsheet to a project with hundreds of
volunteer data-gatherers, developers, scientists, reporters, designers,
editors, and other dedicated contributors.”1 I hope other such efforts
will emerge across the institutional terrain, predicated on
normatively shared values of independence, self-reflexivity, fairness,
transparency, and accountability.
Even as the global pandemic poses perhaps the most serious threat
yet to the international order, I am reminded of the importance of
intellectual exchanges with colleagues around the world as we try to
understand the threats to public health, and of the vital importance
of my own discipline of media and journalism studies. The 2020
International Communication Association planned for Australia’s
Gold Coast in May was called off (and converted to a virtual event),
and the status of future meetings remains uncertain. I’ll regret not
seeing colleagues in person, for what I hope will be a short hiatus,
because many of them shaped my thinking on the ideas contained
here. In the meantime, however, I’m grateful for other global
exchanges, and the ideas that still flow freely thanks to technological
connectivity. I hope this book will add some useful insights to that
exchange about the critical issues raised by this latest challenge.
To better days.
Notes
1 See https://covidtracking.com/about-project.
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Index
9/11 70, 91, 93–5
Acosta, Jim 90
Actor-Network Theory 109–10, 125–6
see also Latour, Bruno
Adelson, Sheldon 135
Alexander, Jeffrey 12, 65–7, 79–80
amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism 118
Amazon 135, 154
ambient journalism 63
American Journalism Project 148
American Legislative Exchange Council 139
Amnesty International 128
Anderson, C. W. 14, 99, 109, 112, 125, 167
Ann Arbor Times 142
Ann Arbor News 152
Ananny, Mike 57, 76, 168–9
Arendt, Hannah 34
Asmolov, Gregory 128
Assange, Julian 117
assemblage theory 19, 22, 75, 80, 110–30, 167–8
see also DeLanda, Manuel; Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Felix; levels
of analysis
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
63, 99
The Atlantic 178
Atlantic Council 128
attacks on media (general) 39–40
See also media bias; partisan media far-right; populism; Trump
audience-centered research 79
Austin American-Statesman 142
authoritarianism
definition 30
journalism as check on 4
see also Snyder, Timothy
authoritative journalism 84
see also Carlson, Matt
Axios 140
Bannon, Steve 47–8, 171
Barlow, John Perry 155
BBC 14, 41, 117, 152
Bell, Emily 144, 152
Bellingcat 128–9
Benkler, Yochai 45, 48, 123–45
Benson, Rodney 135, 150, 154
Berglez, Peter 116–17
Berkman Center 124
Better Government Association 118
Bezos, Jeff 135
Birnbauer, Bill 150
Bolsonaro, Jair 156
Boston Globe 2
bots 33
boundary work/crossings see institution(alism) boundaries
Bourdieu, Pierre 56
field theory 67–8
Boyd, Dana 38
Boydstun, Amber 60
Breese, Elizabeth 65
Breitbart 31, 37, 42, 44, 47–9, 171
Brennan, J. Scott 162
British media 41
right-wing 88
studies 41
Brown, Floyd 49
Buckley, William F. 40
Bush, George W. 70, 73, 87, 95
Bush, George H. W. 70
Buzzfeed 140, 142
Callison, Candis 10, 173
Le Cam, Florence 120
Cappella, Joseph 79
Carey, James 99
Carlson, Matt 40, 75, 84, 91
Castells, Manuel 110, 122, 171
CBS 21, 47, 101
Center for Investigative Reporting 150
Center for Media at Risk 25
Center for News Literacy 174
Center for Public Integrity 147, 150
Center for Responsive Politics 149
Cernovich, Mike 50
Chadwick, Andrew 14, 17–18, 21–2, 33, 88, 110, 129
see also hybrid media system
Chalkbeat 149
chaos voters 9
Chapel Hill News 152
China 33, 120, 177–8
China Dialogue 120
Chomsky, Noam 105
Propaganda Model 36–7, 87, 103
“Citizens United” 49, 140
civic news organizations 148
climate change 10, 13, 52, 117, 127, 139, 144, 173
Nations Climate Action Summit 52
CNN 32, 44, 88, 90
and Trump 32
Coddington, Mark 117
Colbert Report 32
collaborative media see news eco-systems
Collister, Simon 77
Columbia Journalism Review 52, 101
Commission for Public Support for Local News 140
Committee for the Protection of Journalists 172
communication research (general) 4–5
prosumers 5
on specific news organizations 21
Confederation of ASEAN Journalists 119
Confide 121
Confidencial 130
Congressional Commission for Public Support for Local News 140
conspiracy theories 93–6
birtherism 94
Loose Change 94
trutherism 94
Cook, Timothy 68–71, 78, 101, 113
Correctiv 145
De Correspondent 138
counter-institution see populist media
COVID Tracking Project 178
Craigslist 135
Cramer, Kathy 96
Cramer, Richard Ben 70
Crawford, Kate 76
critical theory 37, 87, 103, 167
CrossCheck 127
cultural optimists 12
see also Alexander, Jeffrey; Schudson, Michael
Daily Caller 124
Daily Express 88
Daily Mail 33, 88
Daily Maverick 147, 161
Daily Mirror 88
daily news model 13
crisis of 64, 135
Daily Show 32
Daily Stormer 48
De Maeyer, Juliette 96
“deep state” 2, 12, 29
DeLanda, Manuel 111
Deleuze, Gilles 111
Deuze, Mark 21, 132, 143, 169
Dewey, John 99
Digital Forensics Research Lab 128
digital media
norms and roles 162–3
see also social media
DiMaggio, Paul 56, 68
Direkt36 146
disinformation 155–7, 163
Documenting Hate 127
Domingo, David 120
Douglas, Mary 55
Downie, Leonard 172
The Drudge Report 42
economic crisis (journalism) 5–6, 19, 135–6
see also funding
economic models (journalism) see funding
Efecto Cocuyo 146
Electronic Frontier Foundation 155
Environmental Data and Governance Initiative 127
Epstein, Edward 38
European public media 140
European Union 83, 88
Facebook 20, 49, 52, 124, 131, 135, 154–6, 162–3
Factbase 121
fact-checking 66, 76, 84, 122–3, 164
fake news 29, 32–9, 92, 134, 143
The Federation of Arab Journalists 119
The Ferret 106, 145–6
field repair 146–7
field theory 67–8
filter bubbles 95, 124
First Draft 127
for-profit media/journalism 16, 91–2
see also funding
Forbidden Stories 119
The Ford Foundation 149
Forensic Architecture 128
The Forward 162
Fourth Estate 69, 84, 116, 123
Fox News 42, 46–7, 124–5
Fox and Friends 46
Freedom Voices Network 119
Friedland, Roger 56
funding 134, 157–8
alternative 136, 138, 140
advertising 19, 139, 141
collaboration 137
consumer-driven 138, 141, 143–4
commercial 141–4
foundations 149–51
international models 143, 145–7
nonprofit 140, 144–51
philanthropic 138–9, 148–9, 151
private ownership 135
public-service 106, 151–3
subscriber model 19–20, 143
trust-funded 143–4
university-based 152–3
Galizia, Daphne Caruana 118–19
Gannett Foundation 91, 142
Gans, Herbert 21, 100–1
Garrett, Major 47
Gates, Bill 151
Gatehouse Media 91, 142
Gateway Pundit 45, 124
Gawker 142
libel suit 142
Gearing, Amanda 116–17
#Guptaleaks 118
Gingras, Richard 157
Gizmodo Group 142
Glasgow Media Group 41
global cosmopolitanism 32
Global Investigative Journalism Network 145–6
globalization 11, 30–1, 177
globalization of the press 11, 170–2
see also Castells, Manuel
Global South media 161
Goldberg, Bernard 101
Google 127, 135, 155–7, 162–3
Graves, Lucas 66, 76, 84, 114, 122
Grossman, Lev 94
Guardian 77, 88, 117, 120, 143–4
Guattari, Felix 111
Haidt, Jonathan 28–30
Hall, Stuart 41
Hallin, Daniel 69
Hamilton, James 146
Hanitzsch, Thomas 74–5, 131
Hannity, Sean 42, 46, 50
Hart, Gary 70
Heartland Institute 105, 139
Heclo, Hugh 58–9
Herman, Edward 105
Propaganda Model 36–7, 87, 103
Hermida, Alfred 63
Hewlett Foundation 149
Higgins, Elliot 128–9
Hochschild, Arlie 96
Hofstadter, Richard 95
Hollywood 40
Huntington, Samuel 56, 59, 61, 160
hybrid institution/media system 17–19, 113, 161, 169–70
assemblages 109–12
definition 110
hybrid turn 132, 163–4
see also Chadwick, Andrew
identity fundamentalism 31
see also partisan media far-right
identity politics 3, 31–2
Indiana Environmental Reporter 118
InformNapalm 128
InfoWars 42, 50
Ingraham, Laura 46
Inside Climate News 117–18, 149
institution(alism)
analyses see hierarchy of influences
anti- 27, 44, 122
boundaries 13, 72–7
vs. counter institution 45–51
definition 54–62, 161
de-institutionalize 10, 13
drawbacks 71–2
fragmentation 13
future of 160–1
new institutionalism 68
of the press 12, 59–62
and professions 58–9, 73–5, 89–93
relationships between institutions 71
global 110, 117–19
survival 16
theory 68
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists 116–17
International Federation of Journalists 119
Iowa Public Radio 118
Iraq 70, 87
Jagers, Jan 28
Jeong, Sun Ho 119
Jezebel 142
Jones, Alex 50
Jones, Laura 94–5
journalism as activism 127
journalism definition
see also institutional(ism) definitions
Journalism Innovation Project (Reuters) 161
journalism profession 2–3, 15, 41–3, 47, 58–9, 73–5, 89–93
see also institution(alism) and professions
journalism studies
see also communication research
journalistic epistemology 27, 32–9, 45–51, 66
Kaiser, Robert 172
Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira 28
Katz, Elihu 89
Keeble, Richard 171
Kelly, Megyn 47
Kerner Commission 86
The Knight Foundation 149, 151
Koch brothers 105, 139, 158
Konieczna, Magdalena 76, 146
Kreiss, Daniel 31, 54, 66, 102, 121, 161–2, 165
Latour, Bruno 109–10, 125–6
Lansing Sun 142
Las Vegas Review-Journal 135
levels of analysis 77–9, 114, 115
macro-structural 78, 114, 123
micro-practice 79, 114, 120, 125
see also assemblage theory
Lewis, Michael 12
Lewis, Seth 75, 87, 89, 126
Lichter, Linda 100
Lichter, S. Robert 100
Limbaugh, Rush 37, 42
LION 147
Lippmann, Walter 99
Livingston, Steven 128
Luengo, María 65
Luxembourg Leaks 116–17
McChesney, Robert 84, 151–2, 172
McGinnis, Joe 39
mainstream media (MSM) 40
anti-MSM critique 39–45
global 44–5
see also partisan media far-right; populism
Marantz, Andrew 8
Marlow, Alexander 48
The Marshall Project 149
Marxian perspective 51, 135
media bias
attack on journalism 27, 43
Media Research Center 43–4
studies 43
see also partisan media far-right; populism
media economics 135–7
see also economic crisis
media elite 97–105
co-optation of media by elite 15
criticism of 97, 101
and experts 98–100
liberal media elite 101–3
media misrepresentation 86–7
Mediapart 143, 145
media reform 15
champions 173
critiques by scholars 172
recommendations 87, 153, 165, 167–8
scholars 15
Media Reform Coalition 154
Media Research Center 43, 139
media trust 32, 35, 37
meta-journalism (Carlson) 91
#MeToo 100
Mic 142
Michigan Public Radio 118
Mills, C. Wright 80, 96, 103
MinnPost 147, 150
Minneapolis Star Tribune 118
misinformation 88
anti- 127
in the Philippines 7
Mohr, John 56–7
Le Monde 119
Mother Jones 150
MSNBC 124–5
MuckRock Foundation 121
Mudde, Cas 28
multi-polar media landscape
see partisan media
Murdoch, Rupert 46, 152
The Nation 52
National Environment Reporting Network 117–18
National Insider Threat Task Force 120
National Rifle Association 29
nationalism 29–31, 44
ethno-nationalism 171
NBC 21
network journalism 116–19, 168
definition 109
global 31, 110, 116, 122, 171
see also hybrid institution/media system; news eco-systems;
institution(alism) relationships between institutions
network press freedom 168–9
networked public sphere 16, 109
Network Society 11, 31, 122
see also Castells, Manuel
New Left 98
New York Times 3, 13, 21, 100, 119, 128
and Trump 32, 134, 141, 149
reports 48, 50
revenue 19, 134
The New Yorker 8, 100
news aggregators
Reddit 50
news deserts 64
news eco-systems 2–3, 6, 13, 17–18, 21–2, 109
counter-media eco-system 40, 45–50
definition of 14
hybrid news eco-systems see hybrid institution/media system
Newseum 91–3
news gurus 122
news literacy 63, 173–5
education 38
Newsweek 21
Nielsen, Rasmus. 64, 167
Nieman Lab 148
Nixon, Richard 39–40
nongovernmental organizations (NGO) 4
Norman Transcript 152
norms (journalism) 164
normative aspirations/goals 20–1, 163
normative values/assumptions 162–6
accountability 4, 13
balance 166
civic skepticism 162
concerns 12
democracy 165
detachment 166
objectivity 36–7, 166
“of reasonableness” 164
transparency 4, 127, 139–40, 158
O’Keefe, James 37, 42, 158
Oklahoma Daily 152
Oliver, J. Eric 95
Oliver, John 13
The Onion 32
Open Society Foundation 130, 139, 149
Operação Serenata de Amor 126
OpenSecrets.org 149
Ostertag, Stephen 60, 65
pack philanthropy 150
Packard, Vance 86
Panama Papers 116–17
paradigm repair 75–6
see also field repair; institution(alism) boundaries; media reform;
norms (journalism)
Paradise Papers 116–17
Parsons, Talcott 56, 80–1
partisan media 3, 45–6
4chan 163
alt-right 44
attack on media 103
far-right 3, 27, 29–30, 46, 124
anti-mainstream media 39–45
see also populism
left-partisan 51–2
see also fake news; mainstream media
PEN America 33, 140
Perloff, Richard 60
Pew Research Center reports
advertising revenue 141
consumer revenue 141
journalism employment 2
Philadelphia Inquirer 144
Pickard, Victor 135, 138, 151, 150, 154
Pinch, Trevor 55
polarization (general) 5
threat to democracy 26
see also partisan media
Politico 43, 102, 138, 140
Pooley, Jefferson 89
populism 9, 11, 174
anti-institutional/media 7, 27–30, 39, 44
attack on media 25, 90
Chávez, Hugo 28
definitions of 28
global 7–8, 28, 44–5
Modi, Narendra 28
Orbán, Viktor 28
populist media 9–10
United Kingdom, Brexit 25, 88
see also Trump
post-modernism 34
post-truth era 25, 27, 34, 66, 99, 178
Powell, Walter 56, 68
Powers, Matthew 120
press autonomy 168
press freedom 168–9
decline 25
networked press freedom 168–9
suppression of 30
Prince, Eric 43
Project Veritas 37, 158
ProPublica 118, 127, 147, 149–50
Public Media Merger 152
public service journalism 73, 136, 140, 146–8, 152, 154
The Quint 161
The Rappler 161
Reporters Without Borders 170
Reuters Digital News Report 141
Reuters Institute 64, 141, 161
Rothman, Stanley 100
RT (Russian news outlet) 88
Rusher, William 101
Ryan, April 90
Ryfe, David 57, 67, 71–2, 79, 115
Salt Lake Tribune 144
Sambrook, Richard 117
Sanders, Bernie 28
Sassen, Saskia 30, 111
Scalawag 150
Schudson, Michael 6, 12, 66–7, 78, 114, 167, 174
definition of journalism 131
elites and experts 99–100
see also media elite
Science and Technology Studies (STS) 35
Shirky, Clay 122
Shorenstein Center 149, 152
Silicon Valley 154, 168
Sinclair Broadcast Group 143
Sleeping Giants 48
Smith, Evan 147
Snyder, Timothy 59
authoritarianism 53
threats to institutions 26
sociology
constructionist 35
science as 35
journalism as 35–6
cultural 65
media 100
of news 35–6
organizational 56
social media/digital
anti-regulation 154–5
mis/disinformation 155–6, 163
economic 20, 153–5
Soros, George 139–40, 146
Sparrow, Bartholomew 68–71, 78, 101, 113
Spiering, Charles 48
Splinter 142
Stenner, Karen 28–30
Stephens, Michael 60
Stern, Howard 121
Stone, I. F. 95
Sueddeutsche Zeitung 117
Sun 88
Sunflower Movement 127
The Sunlight Foundation 150
sustainability (journalism) 134
see also economic crisis; funding
Tampa Bay Times 144
Telegraph 88
Tennessee Star 143
Texas Tribune 147–8, 150
Thiel, Peter 142
Thompson, John 87
Thornton, John 148
Time 21
The Times (British press) 88
Tow Center for Digital Journalism 144
tribalism 66
troll farms 33
Trump, Donald 2, 174
attack on media 25, 32–3, 39, 47, 134
elitism 105
media profits 88
normative disruptions 70
“Social Media Summit” 42
Trump bump 141, 149
Tsfati, Yariv 79
Tuchman, Gaye 36, 81
Twitter 20, 47, 50–1, 77, 88, 124, 154
in Congress 17
Usher, Nikki 21
Vice 142
Vidal, Gore 40
Vos, Tim 61, 75
Vox Media 142
Wageman, Andrea 143
Waisbord, Silvio 174
populism 7
Walgrave, Stefaan 28
Wall Street Journal 46, 48
Wallace, Chris 47
War on Terror 87, 95
Washington Post 3, 14, 100, 135, 141, 172
and Trump 32
Watergate 69
Weaver, David 102, 131
Western Journal(ism) 49–50, 156
WhatsApp 155
White, Harrison 57
White House 42, 47–8, 70, 90, 120
WikiLeaks 18, 117
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism 153
Wisconsin State-Journal 118
Witschge, Tamara 17, 21, 132, 143, 163, 169
Wood, Thomas 95
Xi, President 178
YouTube 50, 131, 155–6
Zelizer, Barbie 75, 125, 167
Zuckerberg, Mark 155
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