On Television

Rating:
Summary: A Critique on Journalism
Review: Bourdieu's book, which is actually a lecture transcibed, is a look into the world of journalism on print and on television. Print, now being rivaled by the television news casthas to follow the steps in which television provides the material and the print media has to be there to create a uniformity in competition. If one veers, then people are unsure of what to read, and given the times and the message Bourdieu is giving, I would assume most would follow the TV news. The title of the book might be misleading in that its more about journalism than television itself. The author makes many profound obsevations as well as unveiling some of the competition that actually goes on in journalism where he asks the question "Where does news come from?" Answering quite plainly that the journalists do indeed choose what is news, and what isn't. A good read, a short book, however at some points dense and other points dry and repetitive. Overall highly reccomended for those interested in media theory.

Rating:
Summary: Unreal.
Review: I read this book in French. The quotes are my translation and the page refs are to the French edition. The book is quite short. It brings together the edited text of two talks Bourdieu gave on French TV in March 1996, and an article on the same topic from March 94. The topic is not really television, but rather the effect of TV on journalism. The foreword ends, p. 8: "...I hope [my analyses] will help supply tools or weapons to those who, in the image trade itself, are fighting in to prevent what could have been a formidable instrument for direct democracy from turning into an instrument of symbolic oppression."

If this sounds sensible to you, then read the book, you may appreciate it. Moreso if you also have a taste for comments on the French lit-TV scene. (In France, lit-TV at the time took some of the space occupied in the US by political talk shows. It's half disappeared since then.)

To me, however, the quote sounds Pollyanna. (You read it here first, "Bourdieu has his Pollyanna side".) With a large helping of naïveté, it could have been reality-based back when The Honeymooners was the talk of the town (ask you grandma). Or, more to the point, when Dan Rather first stepped into a TV station. The spirit of the whole book, unfortunately, is faithful to the sentence.

It's not that there is nothing to learn, here and there, from Bourdieu's remarks. It's that at best the pickings would simply fill a scrapbook. They define no particular social phenomenon and no particular aspect of the TV domain in modern society. The book *claims* to be about television, but this is television minus the money shots (aka ads), the soaps, the sports, the generic talk shows, the kids' programming -- TV minus everything but news and public affairs, TV reduced the part where "journalists" get paychecks. Furthermore, while, at the time Bourdieu was writing TV, had been the dominant news source in France for almost as long as it had been in the US, this dominant journalism is measured by the standard of print journalism (which then as now was slipping faster in France than in the US). The French have a word for this, passéisme, past-ism.

The meager theoretical contribution in the book (mostly near the end of the second talk, and in the appended article) concerns the "effets de champ" in journalism, what in America would probably be called systemic effects, and especially their extent (emprise) within the field. Dan Rather's end-of-career misfortune will teach you more, and with a better grounding in reality.

One star because this is definitely in the lower quintile of what one would expect from Bourdieu on television.


Rating:
Summary: A devastating critique of television journalism.
Review: Turn off your television set for an hour to read this book, and then see if, after finishing it, you feel like turning the set back on. Bourdieu, a French sociologist and one of the world's leading intellectuals, has performed a profound critique of what nowadays passes for journalism, both on television and, increasingly, off it as well. The main body of Bourdieu's text was originally given as lectures and is accessible and stimulating to any concerned reader. The translation is excellent and the endnotes are helpful in defining the French context of Bourdieu's remarks. Highly recommended, especially to anyone who practices journalism in any medium.