This new book from Toby Miller engages with journalism from within the cultural studies tradition, addressing fundamental claims for the profession and its biggest contemporary challenges: critiques, objectivity, and insecurity.
Why Journalism? A Polemic considers four key aspects of contemporary journalism in terms of theoretical relevance and historic tasks that are not usually considered in parallel:
- Citizenship: political, economic, and cultural
- Environment: the climate crisis and reporters’ material impact
- Sports: the importance of the popular; and
- Technology: its former, current, and future significance
With examples drawn from Latin America, Spain, and France as well as the US and Britain, the query animating these investigations returns again and again, implicitly and explicitly: why journalism? Miller argues for an answer to that dilemma that will involve a fundamental shift in how reporters, proprietors, professors, students, and states view the profession.
This is essential reading for scholars and students of media and cultural studies as well as journalism studies.
Introduction—why journalism?
1. Citizenship (with Bill Grantham)
2. Environment (with Richard Maxwell)
3. Sports (with David Rowe)
4. Technology
Conclusion
Biography
Toby Miller is Profesor Visitante at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Profesor Catedra de Comunicacion y Teoria Critica at Universidad de la Frontera, and Research Professor in the Graduate Division, University of California, Riverside.
“An engaging romp, a careful dissection, and a radical indictment of what's wrong with journalism. Smart suggestions for where to find signs of renewal and hope, too. Vintage Toby Miller.”
- Silvio R. Waisbord, The George Washington University, USA
"This powerful book is a devastating critique of the failures of Anglo-American journalism. It provides endless examples of the gap between normative accounts of truth-telling and actual practices of stenography, clientilism and complicity with elites. From reporting on everything from food to climate and from sports to war, Miller's polemic situates journalism closer to misinformation than the democratising practice we desperately need it to be."
- - Des Freedman, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
"From a starting point of “cosmic ambivalence about the news today” Miller and his co-authors take us on a political economic and cultural analytic romp through mainstream journalism’s failures. Questioning its moral and material basis from sports journalism to free speech; weaving philosophical and ideological critique with an analysis of journalistic practice defined by a methodological individualism, nationalism and absolutism – Why Journalism is far more than a polemic but it is a rollicking good read!"
- - Natalie Fenton, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
