Hartley

In many ways, Hartley reminds me of James Carey. He wishes to speak about popular reality and about journalism in terms of symbol systems and in terms of culture. He wishes to think about readers rather than audiences, and views readers as participants in the sense-making process of producing culture. Hartley finds journalism to be one of the most important textual systems of modernity; however, he does distinguish between the mainstream press (prestige press) and more “base forms” such as the commercial and tabloid press. He argues that popular journalism – the commercial press—unites in a “common humanity” whereby readers are united in a “familial, informal participation”(16). This seems to be coming quite close to Carey’s assessment that news is one of the rituals that order daily life. However, Hartley is willing to get more specific with regard to journalism’s role as a modern text, even if his vision of journalism escapes the traditional boundaries and sees “trash” press as just as valid as other forms of news media. Hartley argues that journalism is a “textual system of modernity which allows it to be considered as a whole (i.e. across and beyond various binary divides) and at some time allows changes to be viewed historically (i.e. across modernity) (28). In this regard, a community of readers develops and is connected to the larger public.

What happens within mainstream journalism is a struggle over who can count as knowers in a situation where who controls knowledge is granted a certain degree of power. Hartley makes an interesting point here that may be useful for my discussion of the kind of news that online journalism “does well” – that mainstream journalism is a struggle between journalists and critical intellectuals who are engaged in a struggle that is inherently anti-democratic, relies on binaries and is unique because they rarely own the journalism they use (26). Interestingly and perhaps contrary to many Marxist theorists, Hartley does not see the control over knowledge as a class struggle about the ownership of production.

Interesting to my discussion of journalism here is that Hartley calls for a breakdown of the binaries of journalism (see notes) and argues that the distinctions between trash and the prestige press are more a product of journalists and critical intellectuals rather than actual reflections of reality. He demands an empirical inquiry into these thoughts…

There are a couple key terms here that help explain how journalism is a text that explains modernity. Hartley sees a fundamental relationship between the text, the readership, and production; all are in touch with each other through what he dubs the mediasphere—the “creation of popular readership sin the name of democractic equivalence” (13). What is interesting in particular about Hartley is that he is making a cultural claim about the function of journalism while nonetheless tying its function back to larger claims about the public sphere and participation in the social construction of reality. For Hartley, journalism is one of the forces that “creates and serves a disembodied public” that serves “politicized private sphere” – and comes up with this interesting definition of poplar reality: the “textualization of social relation… advancement of logic of democractic equivalence, and the pursuit of comfort in modernizing society. A democraticized mediasphere which not only textualized debut and decision-making but also the public in whose name all this is done (the readership) and participants in the developing dialogue; politicians to entertainers to supermodels…” (29)

In short, our popular reality is a hopeful one that is mediated through text whereby we are all brought together through the logic of democracy in a dialogic relationship. This is a hopeful approach to the function of communication and journalism in society. Additionally, Hartley talks about how one should look at journalism as a sens-making feature of modernity (34) and also as a system (rather than a mode of production) that takes into account the reader. Readers are brought into being and brought into the public through media. What’s interesting is most people presume that the production serves the public, but Hartley argues that the text creates the public. To some degree, he is agreeing with Carey’s claim that communication is democracy and communication is culture. The first feature of society is communication and out of communication we have culture. For Hartley, the text creates our culture and makes us into readers united by a textual system rather than a disembodied public. The audience is brought into being by cultural production (50). There must be a press before thre can be a public…

Hartley demands a careful approach to the study of journalism as well. Like Carey, he notes that too little time has been spent by journalism schools thinking about what journalism means. He thinks that journalism has “its own features, histories, specific relations with institutions and practice” and changes the relationship between addresser and addressee (37).

He proposes an interesting trifecta: journalism “us”; media (to) popular culture (them) but sees it as much more cultural. News becomes a discursive resource for people to use…

Hartley is also fundamentally interested in who controls knowledge, technology and information. He sees the importance of looking at how power relations construct readers and wishes to look at how oppositional logics become part of the public sphere. The universalization and opposition to discourse will come out of the text of modernity: journalism – journalistic mediation (78) helps to determine how political questions come into being.

Once more, the mediasphere receives a definition in his chapter on the media sphere: he defines the mediasphere as away that private selves arrive out of public assembly. Both the institions of social control AND audiences pressure the creation of the self (it isn’t wholly in the hands of the producer). In this regard, Hartley is giving far more importance to readers than many other scholars I have read. He is also going directly to the role of journalism within readerships and in this way is more direct than Carey about the relationship of these readers to systems of power and knowledge.