How to Do Things With Words

The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

語用論(Pragmatics)を考える

Truth and method

Report: Fostering institutionalization and internationalization: ICA’s Journalism Studies Interest Group takes stock of its inaugural year (2004–5)

This study seeks to contribute to the systematic explanation of journalists’ professional role orientations. Focusing on three aspects of journalistic interventionism – the importance of setting the political agenda, influencing public opinion and advocating for social change – multilevel analyses found substantive variation in interventionism at the individual level of the journalist, the level of the media organizations, and the societal level. Based on interviews with 2100 journalists from 21 countries, findings affirm theories regarding a hierarchy of influences in news work. We found journalists to be more willing to intervene in society when they work in public media organizations and in countries with restricted political freedom. An important conclusion of our analysis is that journalists’ professional role orientations are also rooted within perceptions of cultural and social values. Journalists were more likely to embrace an interventionist role when they were more strongly motivated by the value types of power, achievement and tradition.

Setting the agenda, influencing public opinion, and advocating for social change

International media training has become popular in post-New Order Indonesia. Educational organizations have focused on training radio journalists, reflecting the accessibility of radio stations across the nation. This study investigated the training effectiveness and consequent adoption of Western journalism practices in the context of Indonesian radio journalism. Five focus groups were conducted in five Indonesian cities with distinctive media markets, populations, and city sizes. Findings illustrate that the adoption and dissemination of training materials were made more difficult by the widely differing values and backgrounds of journalists as well as a lack of funding from radio stations.

CULTURE CLASH: International media training and the difficult adoption of Western journalism practices among Indonesian radio journalists

Journalism is in transition, there is no question about it. The online environment
has substantially shaken up long-held beliefs about the nature of news and overpampered practices of journalism, even to the extent that the future of professional
news-making has become a matter of concern. Crisis narratives are thriving in the
literature, with some scholars already proclaiming the ‘death’ or ‘end’ of journalism
(McChesney and Nichols, 2010; Charles and Stewart, 2011). Deuze (2006a: 2) has
called journalism a ‘zombie institution’, and the University of Bedfordshire devoted
an entire conference to ‘The End of Journalism?’ in 2008. In this volume, too,
McNair (Ch 5) diagnoses an ‘existential crisis’ of journalism, while he concedes that
new communication technologies do not necessarily reduce the need for professional
journalism but actually enhance them. All these contributions clearly seem to suggest
that journalism as we know it is in search of a redeﬁnition of its purpose and social
contract, as well as a reconstitution of its boundaries, which have become alarmingly
fuzzy with the rise of participatory modes of communication.
At the same time, practitioners, observers and scholars have noted startling signs ofdeclining public trust in the media. Brants (Ch 1) notes in this volume that trust in
media is seen as the ‘life blood of journalism’s role in and contribution to people’s
sense making’. In a world of shrinking conﬁdence in the media, it seems, journalism
is pushing itself to the margins of public debate. After the evaporation of public trust
in political actors, along with a growing sense of cynicism expressed by the larger
public, we now seem to witness a collapse of public conﬁdence in journalism’s capacity
to act in the public interest. This chapter aims to interrogate these observations from
a cross-national and comparative perspective.

Thomas Hanitzsch

Papers

Report: Fostering institutionalization and internationalization: ICA’s Journalism Studies Interest Group takes stock of its inaugural year (2004–5)

Setting the agenda, influencing public opinion, and advocating for social change

CULTURE CLASH: International media training and the difficult adoption of Western journalism practices among Indonesian radio journalists

Journalism, participative media and trust in a comparative context

Journalism of War and Conflict : Generic and Conflict-Related Influences on News Production