Journalistic Authority: Legitimating News in the Digital Era

Journalistic Authority: Legitimating News in the Digital Era

The book argues that authority is not a thing to be possessed or lost, but a relationship arising in the connections between those laying claim to being an authority and those who assent to it. Matt Carlson examines the practices journalists use to legitimate their work: professional orientation, development of specific news forms, and the personal narratives they circulate to support a privileged social place. He then considers journalists' relationships with the audiences, sources, technologies, and critics that shape journalistic authority in the contemporary media environment. Carlson argues that journalistic authority is always the product of complex and variable relationships. Journalistic Authority weaves together journalists’ relationships with their audiences, sources, technologies, and critics to present a new model for understanding journalism while advocating for practices we need in an age of fake news and shifting norms. Matt Carlson is Associate Professor of Communication at Saint Louis University where he teaches and researches in the area of media and journalism studies. His work examines public discourse about journalism, with an interest in the cultural construction of journalistic norms and practices. Rather than view journalism as a stable, self-determining entity, Carlson examines how individuals and groups struggle over the definition of what journalism is, who is a journalist, and what direction journalism should take. These are not subjects of idle speculation, but contests over the shape of the news we receive. This interest in definitional struggle culminated in the book On the Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism (University of Illinois Press, 2011).

Journalistic Authority: Legitimating News in the Digital Era

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