Building Blocks for the Study of Media Criticism

The third speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is David Cheruiyot, whose interest is in studying media criticism; such study has a long history, and evaluates expressions of disapproval or judgment of media texts, actors, outlets, or the media as an institution. But such criticism has evolved, especially through the role of social media, where journalists co-exist on the same platform with their critics.

Some such criticism has also been invited and amplified by news organisations themselves, claiming that it improves their news production processes and enhances media accountability. But criticism can also impact on journalists’ conduct, behaviour, and safety, and result in defensive boundary maintenance by journalists. Existing studies of this are often event- and content-focussed, too, and have yet to capture the multi-faceted nature of media’s criticism. There is a need for more holistic and comparative studies here.

David presents a model that contains five building blocks: content, critic, context, channel, and consequences. Content refers to the text, format, mode, or genre of the media criticism; the critic is the source of the criticism, covering the characteristics, position, motivation, or authority of the actor or originator of the criticism; context addresses the sociopolitical or media system context in which criticism is generated and disseminated; channel captures the spaces or modes through which criticism is shared, displayed, or disseminated; and the consequences might cover the micro-level of the individual journalist, the meso-level of the news organisation, and the macro-level of the media as an institution overall.

This model could be applied by sketching out media criticism cultures, for instance within specific liberal or democratic corporatist cultures. It may help address blind spots in studying media criticism as a phenomenon, culture, or field, and in doing so help to track journalism’s struggle for discursive authority and societal relevance.