Cultural Journalism and Cultural Critique in the Media

Nete Kristensen, Unni From

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138234024
• eBook ISBN: 9781315308012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book addresses a topic in journalism studies that has gained increasing scholarly attention since the mid-2000s: the coverage and evaluation of arts and culture, or what we term 'cultural journalism and cultural critique'. The book highlights three approaches to this emerging research field: (1) the constant challenge of demarcating what constitutes the 'cultural' in cultural journalism and cultural critique, and the interlinks of cultural journalism and cultural critique; (2) the dialectic of globalization's cultural homogenization and the specificity of local/national cultures; and (3) the need to rethink, perhaps even redefine, cultural journalism and cultural critique in view of the digital media landscape.

'Cultural journalism' is used as an umbrella term for media reporting and debating on culture, including the arts, value politics, popular culture, the culture industries, and entertainment. Therefore some of the contributions this book apply a broad approach to 'the cultural' when theorizing and analyzing the production and content of cultural journalism, and the professional ideology, self-perception, and legitimacy struggles of cultural journalists and editors. Other contributions demarcate their field of study more narrowly, both topically and generically, by engaging with very specific sub-areas such as 'film criticism' or 'television series.' This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Practice.

CULTURAL JOURNALISM AND CULTURAL CRITIQUE IN A CHANGING MEDIA LANDSCAPE

Nete Nørgaard Kristensen and Unni From

This special issue addresses a topic of journalism studies that has previously been somewhat neglected but which has gained increasing scholarly attention since the mid-2000s: the coverage and evaluation of art and culture, or what we term “cultural journalism and cultural critique.” In this introduction, we highlight three issues that serve to frame the study of cultural journalism and cultural critique more generally and the eight articles of this special issue more specifically: (1) the constant challenge of demarcating cultural journalism and cultural critique, including the interrelations of “journalism” and “critique”; (2) the dialectic of globalisation’s cultural homogenisation, on the one hand, and the specificity of local/national cultures, on the other; and (3) the digital media landscape seen in terms of the need to rethink, perhaps even redefine cultural journalism and cultural critique.

Introduction: Cultural Journalism and Cultural Critique as Emerging Research Areas

Politics, art, and culture have since the introduction of newspapers in Western societies been covered side-by-side by various and more or less critical writers, of which journalists were just one variety. However, journalism research has a long tradition of prioritising political journalism and news media, primarily as a political public sphere. Likewise, political journalism increasingly came to set the agenda in the newsrooms and in journalism education during the twentieth century. This political leaning in both research and practice is closely linked to the professional and normative ideal or ideology of Western journalism, an ideal that stipulates an autonomous, objective, and versatile press, performing the role of society’s watchdog and addressing urgent events and issues of societal importance as a constituent element of democracy (e.g., Curran 2011; Deuze 2005). Thus in many ways the political bias is fully justified.

One consequence, however, has been the neglect by scholars of the news media’s coverage of “softer” issues such as art, culture, lifestyle, “life politics” (Giddens 1992), and the cultural public sphere—what we, in this special issue, term “cultural journalism.” In much the same way, journalists covering these issues have consistently had to defend their work to their peers and the public (see Harries and Wahl-Jorgensen 2007; Hovden and Knapskog 2015). This scholarly inattention as well as the professional need for justification are striking in light of the fact that these topics have become increasingly important parts of news production during the twentieth century and are today covered intensively (e.g., Janssen, Kuipers, and Verboord 2008; Kristensen and From 2011). When occasionally addressed by scholars, these topics have typically been analysed in relation to political journalism. Political journalism has been viewed as the proper kind of journalism, “the real journalism” (Deuze 2005, 444), while the expansion of topics such as culture, lifestyle, and consumption has been viewed as part of the tabloidisation and commercialisation of journalism (e.g., Hanusch 2012; Reinemann et al. 2011). In continuation of these claims, cultural journalists have repeatedly been criticised for unhealthy interdependencies with the cultural industries or with the market (Bech-Karlsen 1991; Lund 2005; Marshall 2006; Strahan 2011), challenging core roles and values of journalism in democracy. Simply, these topics have been viewed as less legitimate kinds of journalism in their own right and analysed on their own terms—which also explains the need for cultural journalists constantly to defend their professional practice.

However, new research on arts and cultural journalism, cultural critique, and the cultural public sphere is currently emerging (e.g., Hanusch 2012; Hellman and Jaakkola 2012; Jaakkola 2014; Janssen, Kuipers, and Verboord 2008; Janssen, Verboord, and Kuipers 2011; Knapskog and Larsen 2008; Kristensen 2010; Kristensen and From 2011, 2012, 2015b). Cultural journalism is therefore a growing subfield of considerable public significance. In this introduction, we highlight three important and interrelated issues in existing cultural journalism research as frameworks for the eight contributions in this special issue: (1) the constant challenge of demarcating cultural journalism and cultural critique, including the interrelations of “journalism” and “critique”; (2) the dialectic—at the centre of much national and comparative cultural journalism research—of globalisation’s cultural standardisation, on the one hand, and the specificity of local/national cultures, on the other; and (3) the digital media landscape seen in terms of the need to rethink, perhaps even redefine cultural journalism and cultural critique.

Taken together, these issues point towards contemporary journalism being in a state of flux. The boundaries of hard news and soft news are blurring (Reinemann et al. 2011), as are the generic conventions of news and views (Hjarvard 2010; Jacobs and Townsley 2011) as well as the conceptions of professionals and non-professionals (Bruns 2008; Jenkins 2006). Cultural journalism finds itself in the midst of these disruptions and may therefore serve as a prism for studying and understanding the challenges and opportunities currently facing journalism.

Demarcating Cultural Journalism and Cultural Critique as Analytical Objects

Why a special issue on cultural journalism and cultural critique? Some scholars (Bech-Karlsen 1991; Lund 2005) and recurring critical voices in the public debate (e.g., Marker 2014) argue that we have witnessed a decline in the quality of cultural journalism. They interpret the increasing personalisation and sensationalisation (Gripsrud 2000) of the coverage of art and culture as a transformation from critical cultural reflection to publicity-driven journalism, entertainment, and celebrity gossip, i.e. as a debasement of arts and cultural journalism. Expressed differently, they criticise a development in cultural journalism from “cultural critique” to “cultural service journalism.” In this special issue, we approach the association of cultural journalism and cultural critique not as oppositional, incompatible concepts but as mutually dependent parts of a complex equation: while cultural journalism is in some contexts more likely to take shape as intellectual and reflective criticism of culture and society, e.g. when cartoons in the cultural section put ideologies and freedom rights to the test, cultural critique or critical-analytical journalistic discourses, for example in specialised magazines, may provide legitimacy for the cultural journalistic exploration of popular consumerist culture such as television series (Baumann 2001, 2007; Béliard 2015). In fact, historically there have been close connections between cultural journalism and cultural critique: cultural critique has been scrutinised by scholars for many years from within a variety of disciplines with an emphasis on the news media, or cultural journalism, as one of several important institutional frameworks for the practice of cultural critique (e.g., Bordwell 1991; Said 1984). This is, not least, because the review has been a constitutive genre of cultural journalism. Accordingly, recent research has focused on new types of cultural critique or reviewing facilitated by digital media technologies. These potentially circumvent the traditional division of labour between critics, professional cultural journalists, and amateurs (e.g., Holopirek 2007; Verboord 2014), and may offer new opportunities and challenges for the conceptualisation of “critique.” We shall return to this question below, as it is addressed in several articles in this special issue.

What constitutes the “cultural” in cultural journalism and cultural critique is a complex question. As a consequence, scholars use various terms for sometimes the same, sometimes quite different things—arts journalism, cultural journalism, soft news, literary critiques, art reviews, etc. This lack of precision or clear demarcation may be explained by the fact that cultural journalism is associated with larger societal and media cultural phenomena and trends, such as the arts, lifestyles, tastes, literacy, cultural competencies, value politics, etc. A broadly encompassing term for this is “the cultural field” (Bourdieu 1993; Knapskog and Larsen 2008, 11). During the past decades this field has expanded considerably, and one result is that the research potential for cultural journalism scholars has become extremely wide-ranging. Therefore, existing cultural journalism research appears somewhat fragmented and, in some cases, empirically quite narrowly delineated, since, typically in the form of book chapters and research articles, it tends to address specific sub-areas of the broad cultural field. This is the case, to name just a few, with Turner and Orange’s (2013) edited volume on specialist journalism, which, among other things, includes chapters on food journalism, fashion journalism, music journalism, travel journalism, and wine journalism; or Hanusch’s special issue of Journalism Practice and his later edited collection on lifestyle journalism (2013), which includes articles on travel journalism, food journalism, health journalism, and fashion journalism; or Dubied and Hanitzsch’s (2014) special issue of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism on celebrity news. These specialised types of journalism could all be covered by the term “cultural journalism” in a broad sense. More recently, such analyses of the journalistic approach to and coverage of specific sub-areas within the wide concept of “culture” have been supplemented by studies pointing to the close links between the “political” and the “cultural” in cultural journalism (Knapskog and Larsen 2008; McGuigan 2005), in the sense that cultural journalism also addresses political issues through the artistic and popular cultural expressions it debates and contextualises. In some contexts, one might even argue for a re-politicisation of cultural journalism, since important political issues of contemporary society originate from debates on the cultural pages on topics such as religion, race, and immigration (Riegert, Roosvall, and Widholm 2015). The Cartoon Controversy (2006) (e.g., Berkowitz and Eko 2007) and the Charlie Hebdo attack (2015) are two global (and extreme) examples.

In this special issue, as indicated, we use “cultural journalism” as an umbrella term for the media’s reporting and debating on culture, including the arts, value politics, popular culture, the culture industries, and entertainment. Some of the articles included consequently apply a broad approach to “the cultural” when theorising and analysing the self-perception of cultural editors, the professional ideology and legitimacy struggles of cultural journalists, or the production and content of cultural journalism. Other contributions demarcate their field of study more narrowly, both topically and generically, by engaging with very specific sub-areas such as “film criticism” or “television series.”

Homogenisation and Diversity in the Coverage of Culture

Another way of approaching cultural journalism is from a geographical perspective, since national media models and cultural policy traditions constitute particular premises and roles for cultural journalism (e.g., Gripsrud 2009; Janssen, Kuipers, and Verboord 2008). In a Western context, it has been argued that a liberal media model has become increasingly dominant (Hallin and Mancini 2004) and consequently an increased homogenisation and commercialisation of journalism in general and cultural journalism in particular. Similarly, cultural globalisation has transformed the cultural public sphere during the twentieth century. It is held responsible for cultural homogenisation by some critics (e.g., Herman and McChesney 1997), while others argue that cultural diversity has increased (e.g., Appadurai 1996). In the case of cultural journalism, one outcome of these changes is that its cultural focus has expanded considerably, as also indicated above (e.g., Janssen 1999; Knapskog and Larsen 2008; Kristensen and From 2011), resulting in an increasingly diverse cultural palette being covered. However, we also see signs of cultural homogenisation in arts coverage (Janssen, Kuipers, and Verboord 2008), and we see cultural journalism—itself part of the globalised cultural structures (Kristensen 2010)—both mirroring and amplifying these socio-cultural changes.

However, the few, existing comparative studies of cultural journalism (Janssen, Kuipers, and Verboord 2008; Janssen, Verboord, and Kuipers 2011) also show that arts and cultural journalism are still closely connected to and occupied with national identity and national cultural institutions. This implies that there are national variations between media systems when it comes to the prioritising, conceptualisation, and outlook over the cultural in cultural journalism (see also Kristensen 2015). These variations are confirmed by single-country studies of cultural journalism, which have become more numerous especially since the early 2000s. Whereas studies in an American context, for example, point to increasing marginalisation of cultural journalism in the press (NAJP 1999, 2004) and in television (NAJP 2000), cultural journalism in the Nordic countries seems to be thriving and to have expanded (Larsen 2008; Kristensen 2010; Kristensen and From 2011), though competition seems to have increased between an aesthetic (and intellectual) and a media-professional paradigm (Hellman and Jaakkola 2012). Furthermore, studies show that in specific national settings elite newspapers may be characterised by an intellectualising discourse on various popular cultural topics, for example movies in an American context (Baumann 2001) and popular music in a European context (Larsen and Jensen 2010). Van Venrooij and Schmutz’s (2010) comparative study of popular music coverage, for example, shows that the cultural review in Germany continues to have strong ties to a conception of culture and critique “that values idealism and intellectualism and therefore high art discourse appears to be a potent means to achieving legitimacy” (van Venrooij an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Pages
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Cultural Journalism and Cultural Critique in a Changing Media Landscape
• 2. The Political in Cultural Journalism: Fragmented interpretative communities in the digital age
• 3. Doubly Dominated: Cultural journalists in the fields of journalism and culture
• 4. Liquid Modern Journalism with a Difference: The changing professional ethos of cultural journalism
• 5. Arts Journalism and Its Packaging in France, Germany, The Netherlands and the United States, 1955–2005
• 6. From Ivory Tower to Cross-media Personas: The heterogeneous cultural critic in the media
• 7. Post-industrial Cultural Criticism: The everyday amateur expert and the online cultural public sphere
• 8. Film Criticism in the Twenty-first Century: Six Schools
• 9. When Cultural Criticism Blurs Cultural Hierarchies: The case of series journalism in France
• Index