Beyond Normative Conceptions of Journalism and / in Democracy

The first session after the keynote at ANZCA 2023 is on media, truth, and democracy, and starts with John Budarick. He begins by highlighting the considerable challenges to liberal media and democracies, from a range of interconnected crises; but from a different perspective journalism is constantly in crisis as it deals with the changing environments within which it operates.

Democracy itself is founded on a set of abstract positions that privilege the rational and ignore structural inequalities and power relations in society, and democracy’s ills are often attributed to bad-faith actors and the rise of illiberalism – but we might ask where the social and the political are located within these perspectives: they can be seen as ignoring what makes politics political; and as ignoring the concrete messiness of the social, the cultural, in everyday life.

This comes to the fore especially in journalism studies: journalistic professionalisation is arguably built on a mistrust of culture, emotion, meaning, and difference, and positions journalism outside the social and political. It aligns itself with strongly normative understandings of democracy – but what democracy is that?

The discursive turn in political and media theory has confronted such views, and challenged the normative perspective of journalism as autonomous and objective, describing these norms instead as covers for an adherence to existing hegemonies. It instead encourages journalism to pluralise, and thereby to denaturalise hegemony. This also moves towards a greater focus on civil society as a space of culture, identity, and democratic action, where identity is formed and social movements are initiated. This extends even to the third spaces of ostensibly apolitical groups, whose actions can nonetheless represent a distinct if often unrecognised political stance towards culture and society.