A Journalistic Cosmology

Abstract

Can Norwegian journalism be meaningfully understood as constituting a social field in Pierre Bourdieu´s sense? And if so, how did this field emerge historically, and what is its fundamental structure? Following a structural history of the rise of journalism in Norway, a model of this field in 2005 is sketched through correspondence analysis using survey data on Norwegian journalists and editors. The analysis suggest a bipolar structure: a first dimension of capital volume that is closely linked to age, gender and medium type, and a second dimension that opposes agents with different degrees of internal recognition (symbolic capital), which in particular separates specialized news journalists in national and larger regional journalistic publications from journalists in the local press and magazines. Special attention is given to the link between this social cosmos and a specific cosmology of journalistic beliefs and position-takings, the relation between journalistic power and social class, and the intertwinedness of symbolic and economic dominance in this field.