Course description 
Against a background of neo-liberal deregulation, digital convergence and media fragmentation our public discourses are becoming increasingly populist, emotion-laden and confrontational. Critics have voiced concerns about the future of journalism, and about the apparent lack of a unified public space where citizens can converse seriously about matters of collective concern. The so-called ‘information explosion’ has been accompanied by news ‘fragmentation’ and a demand for journalism to meet disparate objectives -- to serve democracy, to cut costs, and to maximize audiences. Long regarded as the bedrock supplier of political information, the newspaper industry, has been hit by the flight of advertising and readers to the internet. The expansion of choice created by ‘post-broadcast’ media technologies has also unleashed a wholesale ‘flight to entertainment’ with negative democratic consequences: diminished opportunities for ‘incidental by-product learning’, fewer moderate political voices in public debates, and more polarised and less representative political institutions. Far from countering these tendencies, the media exacerbate them. Shifts have been charted within television news: a) from information-giving towards story-telling and attraction modes of communication, b) from tightly edited monological news packages, towards looser, less authoritative, more conversational modes of presentation, and c) towards highly equivocal modes of address involving a contradictory mix of elitism and populism: antagonism to elected officials along with conformity to audience tastes. The status of ‘serious’ journalism as a citizen-oriented form of public discourse is now almost routinely called into question, while ‘tabloid’ and ‘fake’ news forms are widely touted as less elitist and more democratic. Under such relentlessly hostile conditions, what is the future for public debate? Is the public sphere disintegrating? What democratic role, if any, might there be left for professional journalism to play?
Recommended reading
Links are through to the Voyager record. Items are cited in accordance with the Chicago
Manual of Style. 15th ed.
Prescribed text
The essential readings are in the course book or in Short Loan. For items in the Short Loan Collection click here. The Short Loan Collection is located in the Kate Edger Information
Commons, Level 1.
Course readings may only be used for the University's educational purposes. You may print a copy for your own use, but you may not make a further copy for any other purpose. You may not copy or distribute any part of the reading to any other person. Failure to comply with these terms may expose you to legal action for copyright infringement and/or disciplinary action by the University.
Part I: Core Concepts
Part II: News Analysis
Part III: Popular News Forms
Part IV: Political Considerations
Part I: Core Concepts
Looking forward
Pro-Tabloid
Anti-Tabloid
Direct Democracy
Public Sphere: History
Looking forward
This lecture surveys the global context of journalism: neo-liberal deregulation, digital convergence, the information explosion, flight to entertainment and rise of hybrid news forms.
Essential readings
- Ben-Porath, Eran N. "Internal Fragmentation of the News: Television News in Dialogical Format and its Consequences for Journalism." Journalism Studies 8, no. 3 ( 2007): 414-431. Available online via Wiley Interscience. Click
 to access the full text.
Recommended reading
Pro-Tabloid
The apology is a postmodern defence of tabloid news against the generalising, abstracting drive of conceptual reason in favour of constructed local truths. Bahktin’s celebration of the carnivalesque is opposed to more rationalist Habermasian public sphere ideals.
Essential reading
- Fiske, John. "Popularity and the Politics of Information." Journalism and Popular Culture, edited by Peter Dalhgren and Colin Sparks, 45-63. London: Sage, 1992.
Recommended reading
Anti-tabloid
The lament against tabloid news is an expression of the modernist faith in representative democracy and rational-critical public dialogue and the corresponding suspicion of commercial spectacle and emotionalism.
Essential reading
Recommended reading
Direct Democracy
Both tabloid journalism and political populism deplore the corruption of representative democracy by oligarchy and see redemptive possibilities in more direct participatory forms such as polls, referenda, and internet chat groups. This lecture reviews contrasting theories of representation to illustrate differences between liberal and communitarian/anarchist views of democracy.
Essential reading
- Lane, Robert E. "'Losing Touch' in a Democracy: Demands Versus Needs." In Elitism,
Populism and European Politics, edited by Jack Hayward, 32-66. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Also available as an e-book via the Library database Oxford Scholarship Online.
Recommended reading
- Murdock, Graham. "Rights and Representations: Public Discourse and Cultural Citizenship." In Television
and Common Knowledge, edited by Jostein Gripsrud, 7-17. London: Routledge, 1999. Also available as an e-book via the Library database Ebrary.
Public Sphere: History
The Habermasian idea of the public sphere is routinely invoked in debates about democracy and the media, but it is also widely derided as too idealistic, Eurocentric and partriarchal. This lecture introduces the notion of the public sphere and places it in the context of Habermas’ subsequent thought.
Essential reading
Recommended reading
- Dahlberg, Lincoln. "The Habermasian Public Sphere: Taking Difference Seriously?" Theory and Society 34, no. 2 (2005): 111-136. Available online via the Library database JSTOR.
Public Sphere: Prospects
This lecture defends Habermasian ideas against critics who share his preoccupation with the problems of democracy, communication and citizenship.
Essential reading
Recommended reading
Part II: News analysis
News narrative
Genre analysis
Pornography
Hybridity
Economics
News narrative
This lecture uses Bell’s discourse analysis to analyse the structure of some simple news stories and to identify distinctive tabloid features.
Essential reading
- Bell, Alan. "Discourse Structure of News Stories." Chap. 3. in Approaches to Media Discourse, edited by Allan Bell and Peter Garrett, 64-104. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Recommended reading
- Knight, Graham."Reality Effects: Tabloid Television News." Queen’s Quarterly 96, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 94-108. This reading is avaialble in the Politics 233 coursebook.
Genre analysis
Tabloid news, particularly its televised form, mingles fictional and non-fictional modes, attaching their sign-posts indiscriminately to varying contents, not to cue appropriate audience responses, but to package particular moments with the technique most capable of giving them commodity value. These techniques are borrowed from various genres: horror/mystery film, detective drama, investigatory documentary, fashion commercials, music television, soap opera etc. We’ll look at some of these.
Essential reading
- Sholle, David. "Buy Our News: Tabloid Television and Commodification." Journal of Communication Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 56-72. Available online via Sage Journals. Click to access the full text.
Recommended reading
- Macdonald, Myra. "Rethinking ‘Personalisation’ and the ‘Infotainment’ Debate." Chap.3 in Exploring Media Discourse. London: Arnold, 2003.
Pornography
Some postmodern feminist readings of the tabloid media see them as empowering women, but the portrayal of women in the commercial media is generally voyeuristic and pornographic. The Sun’s ‘Page 3 Girl’ has been interpreted as a tabloid inversion of conventional middle-class mores which organises readers in terms of cultural attitudes rather than class solidarity, but the Sun’s website is explicitly pornographic. The pornographic gaze embodies system of male power with women as passivly receptive objects, but men as acting and thinking subjects, transgressively intent on their own pleasure.
Essential reading
Recommended reading
- Holland, Patricia. "The Page Three Girl Speaks to Women Too." Screen 24, no 3 (May/June 1983): 84-102.
Hybridity
Mainstream television news has begun to take on many of the techniques of hybridity, collage and excess long characteristic of tabloid news: mixing not only genres, but also industrial templates, formats, and modes of public address. One result is ‘kluge’ news: an ingenious but temperamental mishmash of poorly matched parts cobbled together from disparate industrial templates. We deconstruct this and ponder its political and economic consequences.
Essential reading
- Atkinson, Joe. "Kluge News vs Fake News." pp.1-9. This reading is in CECIL.
Recommended reading
- Fox, Julia R., and others. "No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television." Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 51, no. 2 (2007): 213-227. Available online via the Library database Academic Search Premier.
Economics
The political economy of news helps to explain contemporary rise of tabloidism.
Essential reading
Recommended reading
Part III: Popular News Forms
Pullitzer's New York World
King's Daily Mirror
The Sun & The Star
Fake News
Talk Radio
Talk TV
Pullitzer's New York World
Joseph Pulitzer invented the modern newspaper by expressing outsider values to assemble lucrative audiences in collaboration with corporate advertising and ‘emergency politics’.
Essential reading
Recommended reading
King's Daily Mirror
Not all tabloid newspapers are politically regressive, and the peculiar circumstances of Britain on the eve of WW2 produced a radically populist paper which campaigned for social justice.
Essential reading
The Sun & The Star
Examines British and American versions of the contemporary tabloid, and contrasts them with the Daily Mirror.
Essential reading
- Pursehouse, Mark. "Looking at The Sun: Into the Nineties with a Tabloid and Its Readers." In The Media Studies Reader, edited by Tim O'Sullivan and Yvonne Jewkes. London: Arnold, 1997.
Recommended reading
Fake News
Carnivalesque mockery of authority figures is a common device of both melodrama and tabloid media, but are contemporary news parodies and satires genuinely subversive or do they simply titillate the converted?
Essential reading
- Atkinson, Joe. "Kluge News vs. Fake News." pp.9-18. This reading is available in CECIL.
Recommended reading
- Sella, Marshall. "The Stiff Guy vs the Dumb Guy." New York Times Magazine, September 24, 2000: 72-102. Available online via the Library database Academic Search Premier.
Talk Radio
Controversial radio ‘shock jocks’ exemplify the paradox of the New Right’s moral outrage against ‘the new class’, elites, left-wingers, ‘political correctness’ and so on.
Essential reading
- Mickler, Steve. "Talkback Radio, Anti-Elitism and Moral Decline: A Fatal Paradox?" in Us
and Them: Anti-Elitism in Australia, edited by Marian Sawer and Barry Hindess, 97-116. Perth: API Network, Australia Research Institute, 2004.
Recommended reading
- Morse, Margaret. "Talk, Talk, Talk." Screen 26, no. 2 (March-April 1985): 2-15.
Talk TV
There is an overlap between the story-telling modes of tabloid television shows like Current Affair, Inside Edition, and Hard Copy, and their more serious minded precursors such as 60 Minutes, 20/20 [and closer to home, Holmes, Campbell Live, and CloseUp.]
Essential reading
- Ehrlich, Matthew C. "The Journalism of Outrageousness: Tabloid Television News vs. Investigative News." Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs Issue155 ( Feb. 1996): 1-15. Available online via the Library database Academic Research Library.
Recommended reading
Part IV: Political Considerations
Celebrity Politics
Political Scandals
Deviance
Journalism Ethics
Tabloid Politics
Celebrity Politics
Celebrities appear to lead magical lives, but news coverage of celebrity is actually formulaic, rule-bound, and socially conservative.
Essential reading
Recommended reading
- Clifton, Jane. "Stars in Their Eyes." Listener June 1, 2002, 16-21.
Political Scandals
Distinguishes between different kinds of media scandal-mongering and outlines Thompson’s four theories of scandal, and Ekstrom/Johansson’s recent addition.
Essential reading
Recommended reading
- Ekstrom, Mats, and Bengt Johansson. "Talk Scandals." Media, Culture
& Society 30, no.1 (2008):: 61-79. Available online via the Library database Sage Communication Studies. Click to access the full text.
Deviance
The victims, villains, and heroes who dominate tabloid story-telling are also found in classic melodrama and folk-tales. Some aspects of their relationships are explored here.
Essential reading
Recommended reading
- Gripsrud, Jostein. "The Aesthetics and Politics of Melodrama." In Journalism and Popular Culture, edited by Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks, 84-95. London: Sage, 1992.
Journalism Ethics
This lecture draws distinctions between general and role-specific systems of ethics, between ethics and tastes, and between press freedom and individual rights to free speech. It makes the claim that communicative actions are distinguished primarily by their moral and ethical intentions, and by the (often implicit) contract they have with their audiences. It concludes with Flynn’s defence of humane ideals against postmodernist counter-claims.
Essential reading
Recommended reading
- O’Neill, Dame Onora. "Licence to Deceive?" Chap. 5 in A Question of Trust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Tabloid Politics
Apologists claim the tabloids provide an escape from political domination by recognising difference, but neither the valorisation of difference, nor the social fragmentation celebrated by postmodernists is necessarily liberating. The commercial tabloids favour consumption and spectatorship rather than genuine intersubjectivity or equality; like the kluge news it mocks, fake news offers little hope for a better world.
Essential reading
Essay Readings
First Essay
Second Essay
First Essay
Suggested readings for Questions 1, 2, and 3.
Question 1
- Chambers, Simone. "Universalism in Morality." Chap. 10 in Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996.
- Dahlberg, Lincoln. "The Habermasian Public Sphere: Taking Difference Seriously?" Theory and Society 34, no. 1 (2005): 111-136. Available online via the Library database JSTOR.
- Flynn, James R. How to Defend Humane Ideals: Substitutes for Objectivity. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Also available as an e-book via the Library database Ebrary. See especially p.170-181.
- Goode, Luke. Jürgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere. London: Pluto Press, 2005. Especially chaps 3 and 5. Also available as an e-book via the Library database Ebsco.
Those new to Habermas might like to read these encyclopedia articles to gain an overview:
- Guidry, John. "Public Sphere." In Encyclopedia of Social Theory, edited by George Ritzer, vol. 2. Thousand Oaks Calif.: Sage Reference, 2005. Available online in the Library database Gale Virtual Reference Library.
- Outhwaite, William. "Jurgen Habermas" In The Blackwell Companion to Major Contemporary Social Theorists, edited by George Ritzer. Available online in the Library database Blackwell Reference Online.
Try these Subject heading searches to find more material.
Question 2
- Ankersmit, Frank. "Democracy’s Inner Voice: Political Style as Unintended Consequence of Political Action." In Media and the Restyling of Politics: Consumerism, Celebrity and Cynicism, edited by John Corner and Dick Pels, chap. 2. London: SAGE, 2003.
- Bennett, W. Lance. "Lifestyle Politics and Citizen-Consumers: Identity, Communication and Political Action in Late Modern Society." In Media and the Restyling of Politics: Consumerism, Celebrity and Cynicism, edited by John Corner and Dick Pels, chap. 8. London: SAGE, 2003.
- Dahlgren, Peter. "Reconfiguring Civic Culture in the New Media Milieu." Media and the Restyling of Politics: Consumerism, Celebrity and Cynicism, edited by John Corner and Dick Pels, chap. 9. London: SAGE, 2003.
- Fraser, Nancy. "Rethinking Recognition." New Left Review 3 May-June, 2000, 107-120.
- Goode, Luke. Jürgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere. London: Pluto Press, 2005. Especially pages 48-55. Also available as an e-book via the Library database Ebsco.
- Pels, Dick. "Aesthetic Representation and Political Style: Re-Balancing Identity and Difference in Media Democracy." In Media and the Restyling of Politics: Consumerism, Celebrity and Cynicism, edited by John Corner and Dick Pels, chap. 3. London: SAGE, 2003.
Try these Subject heading searches to find more material.
Question 3
- Conboy, Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community Through Language. New York: Routledge, 2006. Chaps. 3, 5, 7.
- Knight, Graham. "Reality Effects: Tabloid Television News." Queen’s Quarterly 96, no. 1 (1989): 94-108. This reading is available in the Politics 233 coursebook.
- Langer, John. Tabloid Television: Popular Journalism and the 'Other News'. London: Routledge, 1998, pp 74-103. Also available as an e-book via the Library database Ebsco.
- Pursehouse, Mark. "Looking at The Sun: Into the Nineties with a Tabloid and Its Readers." In The Media Studies Reader, edited by Tim O'Sullivan and Yvonne Jewkes. London: Arnold, 1997.
- Sholle, David. "Buy Our News: Tabloid Television and Commodification." Journal of Communication Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 56-72. Available online via tSage Journals. Click to access the full text.
- Sparks, Colin, and John Tulloch. Tabloid Tales: Global Debates Over Media Standards. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
Try these Subject heading searches to find more material.
Second Essay
- Fairclough, Norman. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Taylor & Francis, 2003. Available as an e-book via the Library database Ebsco.
- Gee, James Paul. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. 2nd ed. New York: Taylor & Francis Routledge, 2005. Available as an e-book via the Library database Ebsco.
Suggested readings for questions 1, 2, and 3.
Question 1
- Baumgartner, Jody, and Jonathan S. Morris. "The Daily Show Effect: Candidate Evaluations, Efficacy, and American Youth." American Politics Research 34, no. (2006): 341-367. Available online via Sage Political Science. Click to access the full text.
- Borden, Sandra L., and Chad Tew. "The Role of the Journalist and the Performance of Journalism: Ethical Lessons from “Fake” News (Seriously)" Journal of Mass Media Ethics 24, no. 4 (2007): 300-314. Available online via Informaworld. Click to access full text.
- Cooper, Christopher A., and Mandy Bates Bailey. "Entertainment Media and Political Knowledge: Do People get any Truth out of Truthiness?" Homer Simpson Goes to Washington: American Politics Through Popular Culture, edited by Joseph J. Foy, chap. 8. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2008.
- Fox, Julia R., and others. "No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television." Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 51, no. 2 (2007): 213-227. Available online via the Library database Academic Search Premier.
- Jones, Jeffrey P. "'Fake' News versus 'Real' News as Sources of Political Information: The Daily Show and Postmodern Political Reality." In Politicotainment: Television’s Take on the Real, edited by Kristina Riegert.,129-149. New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang, 2007.
- Sella, Marshall. "The Stiff Guy vs the Dumb Guy." New York Times Magazine, September 24, 2000: 72-102. Available online via the Library database Academic Search Premier.
- Smolkin, Rachel. "What the Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart: No, Not to be Funny and Snarky, but to be Bold and to do a Better Job of Cutting Through the Fog." American Journalism Review 29, no. 2 (2007): 18-25. Available online via the Library database Expanded Academic.
Try these Subject heading searches to find more material.
Question 2
- Macdonald, Myra. "Rethinking ‘Personalisation’ and the ‘Infotainment’ Debate." Exploring Media Discourse. London: Arnold, 2003.
Try these Subject heading searches to find more material.
Question 3
Try these Subject heading searches to find more material.
Consult the Library guide on newspapers to see which New Zealand newspapers are held by the University of Auckland Library.
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