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Paradigmatic tensions in the sociology of news

newsrooms by Gaye Tuchman and Herbert Gans, to the enormous influence of the sociology of deviance on Stan Cohen and Jock Young (and, thus, on to critical criminology and the early media work of Stuart Hall; cf Jones 1997) and, finally, on to more contemporary figures such as Todd Gitlin and Michael Schudson. Many of these authors focused on what Schudson (1996) calls ’the sociology of news production’. Often based in (sometimes participant) occupational studies of journalists, this tradition is best known in Australia through the work of Rod Tiffen (1989). While Tiffen’s work could be broadly defined as political sociology, it is significant that both he and Ian Ward (1995), the author of the best Australian overview textbook in this field, write from within political science. That discipline has a similar tradition. It can, perhaps, stake a stronger claim to Paul Lazarsfeld’s voting studies, and the ’administrative research’ orientation of much postwar media studies that they strongly influenced, than can sociology. This ’Lazarsfeldian’ paradigm also strongly informed the ’foundational’ role played by Henry Mayer in Australian media studies. But Lazarsfeld was also the key target of C. wight Mills’ 1959 critique of ’abstract empiricism’ and, twenty years later, the focus of Todd Gitlin’s attack on ’the dominant paradigm’ in media sociology (Mills 1959, p. 59; Gitlin 1978). This paradigm still casts a long shadow over the field. Mayer’s aggressive promotion of a normative skepticism was fostered through his famed pragmatic dismissals of any normative arguments alluding to a conception of the social responsibility of ’news media’ as one which might facilitate an informed democratic citizenry. Schultz cites a characteristic statement from his The Press ill