Abstract
American journalism’s preoccupation with fake news, civility and subversion in the aftermath of Trump represents an attempt by the journalistic field (Bourdieu, 1998 & 2005) to re-articulate its cultural capital as the technocratic arbiter of Truth. American liberalism has retreated into techno-metaphors of the social which attribute Trump’s ability to circumvent the disciplines of journalistic fact-checking or civic norms as a corruption of communicative networks in the form of fake news, hacking and data breaches. The disproportionate concern for Russian subversion of democratic processes perpetuates the technocratic illusion of data-informed mastery over contingent political forces and “truth”. In disavowing the field’s role in the rise of Trump, an embattled “Resistance” habitus akin to Edward R. Murrow has emerged in order to cast the crisis as a battle for decency, civility and a patriotic centre against the subversive outside (Muhlman, 2008). The field restages past battles as a performative invocation of former glories to engender the forms of urgent affective media prosumption (Jutel, 2017) that are at the heart of fake news economies. The cost of “saving” truth and the field of journalism is the subsumption of its autonomy to the field of power as national security entrepreneurs, think tanks and research centres all offer the fantasy of divining foreign subversion within communicative networks. This techno-solutionism (Morozov, 2014) and civility fetish is necessary to avoid an antagonistic political articulation of truth, what Bourdieu terms an ‘idée-force’ (2005: 39), that would force a traumatic confrontation with the field’s own complicity in the rise of Trump.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I term this a class rather than a field because it centres around the heteronomous high culture poles of fields without it announcing or regulating itself as a field.
- 2.
Michael Wolf’s all-access account “Fire and Fury” claims Trump had no interest in winning the presidency but was driven by a mediatized rationale that ‘losing was winning’ (Wolf 2018, p. 34). Trump would increase his fame as a ‘martyr to crooked Hillary’, while Ivanka and Jared would emerge as ‘international celebrities and [Trump] brand ambassadors’ (ibid., p. 34). Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified to the US House Oversight Committee that Trump saw his campaign as ‘the greatest infomercial in political history’ (2019). Cohen confirmed Wolf’s account that Trump ‘never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general. The campaign for him was always a marketing opportunity’ (ibid.).
- 3.
Caton (2017) cites this refrain and similar funding pleas in the months after the election in the ad and editorial copy of the Guardian U.S., Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Slate.
- 4.
Bourdieu’s view of politics as the power to impose symbolic violence and the ‘legitimate principle of vision and division’ (2005, p. 39) is not dissimilar from the discourse theory premise that antagonism is the ontologically necessary condition of possibility for politics.
- 5.
In a similar vein Thompson writes in the Introduction to Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power ‘Linguistic utterances or expressions are always produced in particular contexts or markets, and the properties of these markets endow linguistic products with a certain “value”’ (1991, p. 18).
- 6.
Murrow himself, the subject of Red Scare smears, famously battled Joseph McCarthy on appeals to his own exemplary patriotism: ‘The record would soon show who had served the Communists – You or I’ (Muhlmann, p. 103).
- 7.
The grand narrative of Trump/Russia collusion, which has been effectively shot down by the publication of the Mueller report, has been a spectacular collective failure of the field with leaders such as The Guardian, CNN, MSNBC and Slate having committed egregious acts of misreporting (Greenwald 2019).
For an exploration of Russiagate narratives see Jutel (2017b, 2020).
- 8.
The feverish state of the perpetual Resistance news cycle was satirized by the online video company Super Deluxe (2018). The video titled “Donald Trump Is Finished” is a supercut that tracks the use of Trump era media clichés; “Bombshell”, “Turning Point”, “Beginning of the End”, “Tipping Point”, throughout his presidency.
- 9.
One of the more remarkable examples of the Times’ civility fetish was the coverage of Allan Dershowitz’s personal travails in the exclusive Martha’s Vineyard vacation island. Dershowitz wrote a self-serving column for The Hill in which he describes his liberal neighbours cold shoulder, resulting from his critiques of the Mueller investigation, as a regrettable ‘symptom of the times’ (2018). The Times astonishingly gave this “story” the front page and ran four stories, across four different news desks involving eight different journalists in the course of six days (Grove 2018).
- 10.
McCain was a consistent target of brutal personal attacks from Trump and was subsequently held up by journalists, in the words of the Columbia Journalism Review, ‘as the standard bearer for all that is decent and noble in American politics’ (Vernon 2018). This vaunted status speaks to McCain’s commitment to the rules of the game and the cultivation of a certain media capital, through his often public and dramatic deliberations as a crucial Senate vote, rather than a substantive political antagonism. McCain’s voting record in the Senate was 83% in alignment with the Trump White House which was among the highest for Republicans Senators who represent a district in which Trump won by less than 5% (FiveThirtyEight 2019).
- 11.
As a politics sans antagonism it is susceptible to co-optation as with Trump’s “Jobs not Mobs” mid-term election campaign slogan which cast the populists as victims of incivility.
- 12.
2020 Democratic party presidential hopeful Kamala Harris in her campaign launch stated of Trump and Russia; ‘we have foreign powers infecting the White House like malware’ (2019).
- 13.
The journalist and historian Thomas Frank identifies the Democratic party presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972 as a decisive split from organized labour towards the post-industrial professionals that influential party strategist Frederick Dutton described reverentially as ‘aristocrats en masse’ (Frank 2016, p. 41).
- 14.
Writing for Harpers Thomas Frank (2018) has decried journalism’s inferiority complex to the cult of the professional; ‘This is a field…that has to a pathological degree embraced the forces that are killing it. No institution has a greater appetite for trendy Internet thinkers than journalism schools. We are all desperately convincing ourselves that we need to become entrepreneurs, or to get ourselves attuned to the digital future – the future that is described to us by a cast of transparent bullshit artists’ (p. 145).
- 15.
One of the promises of the digital revolution was the democratization of powerful data tools such as Google’s Fusion Tables. The announcement of Google’s shutdown of Fusion Tables (Melendez 2018) is a blow to data journalism and much like Facebook’s “pivot-to-video ” demonstrates the pitfalls of the field’s faith in monopolistic tech platforms.
- 16.
One of the rallying cries for the far-right pro-Trump conspiracy movement QAnon is the former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s address to the conservative Young Americans Foundation. Flynn attributes the success of the Trump campaign to ‘an army of digital soldiers…what we call citizens journalists…who took over the idea of information. They did it through social media’ (YAFTV 2016). What is remarkable here is just how thoroughly the American far-right has taken on the techno-optimist discourses of alternative and social media empowerment.
- 17.
Adrian Chen of the New Yorker who originally uncovered the Internet Research Agency troll farm has opined that the IRA’s campaign was ‘inept and haphazard’ and has been ‘blown out of proportion’ by so-called ‘information warfare’ experts (Chen 2018). He jibes that ‘only an expert, well-versed in terms such as “exposure,” “feedback loops,” and “active measures,” can peer into the black box and explain to the layperson how it works’ (ibid.).
- 18.
The $46,000 IRA campaign amounted to just 0.05% of political Facebook ad spends during the 2016 elections and posts generated by suspected Russian accounts amounted to 1 out 23,000 pieces of content on Facebook’s news feed (Mate 2018). Mate has described the IRA as a conventional clickbait marketing operation which glommed onto the US presidential campaign, among many other topics, because this was a driver of impassioned online prosumption.
References
Adgate, B. (2018, April 18). The Ratings Bump of Donald Trump. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2018/04/18/the-ratings-bump-of-donald-trump/#35c674da7ec1. Accessed 10 December 2018.
Anderson, C. W. (2018). Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Anderson, C. W., Bell, E., & Shirky, C. (2012). Post-industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present. New York: Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
Anonymous. (2018, September 5). I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html. Accessed 7 January 2019.
Benson, R. (1999). Field Theory in Comparative Context: A New Paradigm for Media Studies. Theory and Society, 28(3), 463–498.
Benson, R. (2006). News Media as a ‘Journalistic Field’: What Bourdieu Adds to New Institutionalism and Vice Versa. Political Communication, 23, 187–202.
Benson, R., & Neveu, E. (2005). Field Theory as a Work in Progress. In R. Benson & E. Neveu (Eds.), Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (pp. 1–29). Cambridge: Polity.
Blumenthal, M. (2018, October 23). Facebook Censorship of Alternative Media ‘Just the Beginning’ Says Top Neocon Insider. Grayzone Project. https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/10/23/facebook-censorship-of-alternative-media-just-the-beginning-says-top-neocon-insider/. Accessed 9 February 2019.
Boler, M., & Davis, E. (2018). The Affective Politics of the ‘Post-Truth’ Era: Feeling Rules and Networked Subjectivity. Emotion, Space and Society, 27, 75–85.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power (G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production (R. Johnson, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1995). The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (S. Emanuel, Trans.). Stanford: Standford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1998). On Television (P. Ferguson, Trans.). New York: New Press.
Bourdieu, P. (2005). The Political Field, the Social Science Field, and the Journalistic Field. In R. Benson & E. Neveu (Eds.), Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (pp. 29–48). Cambridge: Polity.
Broersma, M. (2010). The Unbearable Limitations of Journalism: On Press Critique and Journalism’s Claim to Truth. International Communication Gazette, 72(1), 21–33.
Caton, A. (2017, March 15). Now More Than Ever. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/15/now-more-than-ever-now-more-than-ever-needs-to-go/?utm_term=.ed0a077b3fab. Accessed 28 November 2018.
Chen, A. (2018, February 22). A So-Called Expert’s Uneasy Dive into the Trump-Russia Frenzy. New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/a-so-called-experts-uneasy-dive-into-the-trump-russia-frenzy. Accessed 7 February 2019.
Cohen, D. (2018, December 25). Senate Report on Russian Interference Was Written by Disinformation Warriors Behind Alabama ‘False Flag Operation’. Grayzone Project. https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/12/25/senate-report-on-russian-interference-was-written-by-disinformation-warriors-behind-alabama-false-flag-operation/. Accessed 12 February 2019.
Cohen, M. (2019, February 27). The Full Text of Michael Cohen’s Testimony to Congress. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/27/full-text-michael-cohen-statement-to-congress. Accessed 28 February 2019.
Collins, E. (2016, February 29). Les Moonves: Trump’s Run Is ‘Damn Good for CBS’. Politico. https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/les-moonves-trump-cbs-220001. Accessed 28 November 2018.
Couldry, N. (2003). Media Meta-Capital: Extending the Range of Bourdieu’s Field Theory. Theory and Society, 32(5–6), 653–677.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (2019, August 23). Sematic Forensics. Federal Business Opportunities. https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=396f5a1316fe23b1403e164067113cd3&tab=core&_cview=0. Accessed 6 September 2019.
Dershowitz, A. (2018, June 27). Maxine Waters Does Not Speak for Democrats or Liberals. The Hill. https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/394346-maxine-waters-does-not-speak-for-democrats-or-liberals. Accessed 12 December 2018.
FiveThrityEight. (2019, January 3). Tracking Congress in the Age of Trump. FiveThirtyEight. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/. Accessed 1 July 2019.
Francia, P. (2018). Free Media and Twitter in the 2016 Presidential Election: The Unconventional Campaign of Donald Trump. Social Science Computer Review, 36(4), 440–455.
Frank, T. (2016). Listen Liberal. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Frank, T. (2018). Rendezvous with Oblivion. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Frenkel, S., & Wakabayashi, D. (2018, February 19). After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/russian-bots-school-shooting.html. Accessed 2 February 2019.
Greenwald, G. (2019, January 21). Beyond Buzzfeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-worst-most-embarrassing-u-s-media-failures-on-the-trumprussia-story/. Accessed 26 February 2019.
Grove, L. (2018, September 7). New York Times Executive Editor Dean Basquet: Yes, We Did Too Many Alan Dershowitz Stories. Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/dean-baquet-nyt-executive-editor-yes-we-did-too-many-alan-dershowitz-stories. Accessed 12 December 2018.
Guilford, G. (2018, June 5). Trump Now Owns the Republican Party. Quartz. https://qz.com/1295674/donald-trump-now-owns-the-republican-party/. Accessed 1 July 2018.
Hallin, D. (2006). The Passing of the ‘High Modern’ of American Journalism Revisited. International Communication Association & American Political Science Association, 16(1), 1–2.
Harris, K. (2019, January 27). Transcript: Kamala Harris Kicks Off Presidential Campaign in Oakland. Fox KTVU. http://www.ktvu.com/news/transcript-kamala-harris-kicks-off-presidential-campaign-in-oakland. Accessed 1 February 2019.
Hearn. (2016). https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476416652699.
Higgins, E. (2018, August 22). Meet the Most Insidious #Resistance Grifters. The Outline. https://theoutline.com/post/5973/meet-the-resistance-grifters?zd=1&zi=ffsznvf3. Accessed 12 October 2018.
Hirst, M. (2017). Towards a Political Economy of Fake News. Political Economy of Communication, 5(2), 82–94.
Jutel, O. (2013). American Populism and the New Political Economy of the Field. Political Economy of Communication, 1(1), 26–42.
Jutel, O. (2017a). Donald Trump’s Libidinal Entanglement with Liberalism and Affective Media Power. Boundary2 Online. http://www.boundary2.org/2017/10/olivier-jutel-donald-trumps-libidinal-entanglement-with-liberalism-and-affective-media-power/#_edn5. Accessed 19 November 2018.
Jutel, O. (2017b). Paranoia & Delusion: Liberalism’s Descent into Cold War Fantasies. Overland, 227, 3–9.
Jutel, O. (2018). American Populism, Glenn Beck and Affective Media Production. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 21(4), 375–392.
Jutel, O. (2020). Post-politics. In Y. Stavrakakis (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory. London: Routledge.
Knight, C. (2016). Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kosoff, M. (2018, October 17). Was the Media’s Big ‘Pivot to Video’ All Based on a Lie? Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/was-the-medias-big-pivot-to-video-all-based-on-a-lie. Accessed 27 November 2018.
Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
Lapowsky, I. (2018, August 15). Inside the Research Lab Teaching Facebook About its Trolls. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-enlists-dfrlab-track-trolls/. Accessed 7 February 2019.
Levine, J. (2018a, June 28). Ex-NY Times Chief Slams Paper for Failing to Cover Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Pisses Me Off’. The Wrap. https://www.thewrap.com/ex-nyt-chief-slams-paper-for-failure-to-cover-ocasio-cortez-kind-of-pisses-me-off/. Accessed 1 July 2018.
Levine, Y. (2018b). Surveillance Valley. New York: Public Affairs.
Martinez, A. (2018, February 23). How Trump Conquered Facebook Without Russian Ads. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/how-trump-conquered-facebookwithout-russian-ads/. Accessed 21 January 2019.
Mate, A. (2018, December 23). New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/russiagate-elections-interference/. Accessed 14 February 2019.
Melendez, S. (2018). RIP Fusion Tables: Google is Killing Off the Beloved Data Visualization Tool. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/90279779/rip-fusion-tables-google-is-killing-off-the-beloved-data-visualization-tool. Accessed 14 January 2019.
Morozov, E. (2014). To Save Everything Click Here. New York: Public Affairs.
Mouffe, C. (2005). On the Political. London: Routledge.
Muhlman, G. (2008). A Political History of Journalism. Cambridge: Polity.
New Knowledge. (2018, December 18). The Disinformation Report. https://www.newknowledge.com/articles/the-disinformation-report/. Accessed 14 February 2019.
Phelan, S., & Salter, L. (2019). The Journalistic Habitus, Neoliberal(ized) Logics and the Politics of Public Education. Journalism Studies, 20(2), 154–172.
Roll, N. (2017, August 11). $147,000 for a One-Year Master’s? In Journalism? Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/08/11/new-journalism-degree-columbia-150k-catch. Accessed 14 January 2019.
Shane, S., & Blinder, A. (2018, December 19). Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russia Tactics. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jones-russia.html. Accessed 14 February 2019.
Super Deluxe. (2018, October 18). Donald Trump Is Finished. Super Deluxe Super Cuts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjUvfZj-Fm0. Accessed 11 November 2018.
Suskind, R. (2004, October 17). Faith Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html. Accessed 7 December 2018.
Taibbi, M. (2018, November 26). Who Will Fix Facebook? Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/who-will-fix-facebook-759916/. Accessed 7 February 2019.
The New York Times. (2017, February 23). TV Commercial: The Truth is Hard. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY0Fdz350GE. Accessed 28 November 2018.
Timberg, C. (2016, November 24). Russian Propaganda Effort Helped Spread ‘Fake News’ During Election, Experts Say. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html?utm_term=.e576ec1cdcba. Accessed 9 February 2019.
Trump, D. (2018, October 30). @realDonaldTrump. Twitter. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1056879122348195841. Accessed 28 November 2018.
Vernon, P. (2018, August 27). Remembering John McCain and His Relationship with the Press. Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/john-mccain-and-the-press.php. Accessed 12 December 2018.
Vox. (2014, March 17). Understand the News. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQnhigbI4g4. Accessed 14 January 2019.
Wolf, M. (2018). Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. London: Little, Brown.
YAFTV. (2016). Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0CThXL37Jk. Accessed 12 March 2019.
Ylä-Anttila, T. (2018). Populist Knowledge: ‘Post-truth’ Repertoires of Contesting Epistemic Authorities. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 5(4), 356–388.
Žižek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.
Acknowledgement
For Tony Schirato a friend and great Bourdiuian.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jutel, O. (2019). Civility, Subversion and Technocratic Class Consciousness: Reconstituting Truth in the Journalistic Field. In: Overell, R., Nicholls, B. (eds) Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-25669-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-25670-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)