The Anthropology of News and Journalism book provides insights to meld the dynamics of anthropological dimensions with media studies. The book captures an enriching and comprehensive form of practices within the cultural dimensions in news production and reception. Its formative turn and the idea of producing anthropology of news and journalism as ‘needs’ in the discipline of media studies bring even more possibilities for novel perspectives towards the cultural world of media, not only limiting within the newsroom and reception practices. The book can act as a guide for journalists and students in media and communication studies to understand how news has been studied within the discipline, where do we go from here, and what are the future possibilities? The book deeply acknowledges the circularity of news production, which is stressed in cultural studies (Hall 2005), while suggesting a look into the study of textual content of news and the reception and circulation of news in everyday life.
The introductory chapter stresses how the need for an anthropology of news as a cultural phenomenon was only a recent one. Bird argues that while there is an exceptional number of studies available on the newsroom, very few have tackled reception of news, and even fewer anthropologists have explored the content of news (3). While most of the authors in this book do not utilise textual analysis as a significant tool to understand news, their focus is rather on the becoming of texts and the circulation of meanings among the audiences touching upon the textual interpretation. Hence, Bird suggests a shift of attention towards the texts, in addition to its production and reception, as this can act as a sharp notch towards the translation of cultures, and to understand the rich material as composite of stories told in news to tell us a great deal about specific cultural circumstances (Bird 2010, 7). Bird offers that anthropologists can comprehend joining media studies and interdisciplinary discourse analysis in interpreting the power of news stories to shape everyday reality. The book is comprehensive enough in addressing the rise of the internet and the complicated process of sharing news on multiple digital platforms. The result being the emergence of the cultural significance of news through everyday interaction as people pay attention to news very selectively.
The text is dense and ethnographically rich. It is divided into 3 parts, each part focusing simultaneously on “Ethnography of news production”, “News practices in everyday life”, and “News in the era of new media”. The review selected altogether six essays from each part. The rationale behind the selection is that they represent each part. This does not undermine the other essays, as they are equally important.
“Ethnography of news production” points towards the narrative that gives deep insight into the vast array of newsroom studies, showing the changing and growing mode of production. Wahl-Jorgensen’s essay centralising on news production shows how events are turned into news and how this finds its shape in the area of cultural circulation. She pointed out that the available scholarships on news operations are largely centralised on newsrooms of often large and elite news organisations, which minimise the significance of news production in the local and non-Western countries with fewer resources and its new virtual environment. Gursel’s work addresses the negotiation of international news in the context of Israeli construction of barriers, as news is constructed to meet the audiences’ eyes, particularly the U.S. audiences. It shows how international news production is more of a question of struggle over power relations in determining who defines the reality of the events and the people’s lives it impacts. In making the news, from story creation, photos, to gatekeeping, there is always an imagined audience. Rao takes us to India to show how events become news in a distinctive context within the local native language press. The press becomes a space for contestation, struggle for position, and to build a figure as part of local interests. A considerable feature of what Wahl-Jorgensen calls a theoretically ‘messy’ form of news gathering is manifested. A deep distinction between journalist, audience, and newsmaker is observable who do not fit the conventions.
“News Practices in Everyday Life” illuminates an extension towards an analysis of news-related practice. Readers are passive and conscious of the newspaper as one medium among a web of other media. By a move away, though not completely, from news texts themselves and through an entry into the lives of the community people, Peterson looks at manifest meanings in attending to particular news genres over others and how patterns of news readings fit into one’s daily routine (see also, for example, Peterson 2003 for understanding the forms of negotiation within the reception process). This entrusts a way to locate and learn the circulation of dominant meanings, the interrelationship of news politics, class, caste and other categorical factors. People engage within the social fields, as constituted by news consumption, as they produce narratives and get involved in a performative construction of themselves, imagining themselves and others as members of broader imagined communities (181).
In “News in the Era of New Media”, one can find that the potential of online journalism embraces this new environment. In Salon.com, Russell proves the predictions about the digital environment that signal the end of intellectual analysis to be wrong and presents digital platforms as a fostering power for journalism. Growing online journalism platforms such as online blogs focus on small audiences rather than the ‘masses’, which reach through traditional news. This form of online journalism allows audiences’ participation and production while maintaining the authority of journalists as professionals.
Despite the book being a decade old, it is still relevant and useful in giving implicit insights to students and journalists for grasping a deep sense of the trend in the anthropology of news. It may be put that the book altogether asks three important questions: What can anthropology bring something new to the scholarship on news and journalism? How can communication and journalism studies be brought together under anthropological locations to dissect how ‘truth’ is negotiated through news? How does media, as inextricably embedded in culture, reflect and reshape the culture in its ongoing process?
While Bird suggests for more anthropologists to become involved in cultural studies of news, inserting a comparative perspective that is sorely lacking, she also proposes to look at the texts, its creation and the meaning of news in everyday life in an ethnographic fashion. The book also shows detailed ethnographic studies of how news is received in specific cultural circumstances and how we need a better understanding of what news is, and is perceived to be, across differential circumstances in diverse cultural contexts (33). In response to this, it is suggestable to move towards philosophical anthropology of news (or media in general) (see Das et al. 2014). We know a great deal of what news does but know little of what this news is, otherwise. Rather than focusing solely on the texts, production and reception/consumption, it is high time to take seriously the question, “Do we undoubtedly consume news?” or “Is the news that consumes us?”
As Hegel puts it, “The familiar is not necessarily the known” (see Lefebvre 1991, 15). For example, to map out what news is, it makes sense to meld together Deleuze and Guattari’s (2000, 2020) Body Without Organs (BwO) and Baudrillard’s (1983) Simulacra towards a philosophical anthropology (for example, Fassin 2014, Singh 2014) of news. Or, to put it simply, as Foucault (1965, ix) would argue, to understand ‘madness’ is to renounce the terminal truth about madness and never let ourselves be subsumed by what we may know of madness. What do we know of news (media)?
References:
- Baudrillard, J. 1983. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e).
- Das, V., M. Jackson, K. Arthur and B. Singh (eds). 2014. The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy. United States: Duke University Press.
- Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 2000. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
- Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 2020. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Fassin, D. 2014. “The Parallel Lives of Philosophy and Anthropology”. In The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, edited by Veena Das., Michael Jackson, Kleinman Arthur and Bhrigupati Singh, 50-70. Durham: Duke University Press.
- Foucault, M. 1988. Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books.
- Hall, S. 2005. Encoding and Decoding. In Culture, Media, and Language, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis, 117-127. New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library.
- Lefebvre, H. 1991. Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. Translated by John Moore. London: Verso.
- Peterson, A. 2003. Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium. New York: Oxford.
- Singh, B. 2014. “How Concepts Make the World Look Different: Affirmative and Negative Genealogies of Thought.” In The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, edited by Veena Das., Michael Jackson, Kleinman Arthur and Bhrigupati Singh, 159-187. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Suanmuanlian Tonsing is a PhD Scholar in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.