Democracy, the Academic Field and the (New Zealand) Journalistic Habitus

The relationship between journalism and the academy is historically fraught. Any mention of the word ‘theory’ is only likely to exacerbate these tensions, since it perhaps signifies, most clearly, the division between both identities. Drawing on the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, this paper considers, with particular empirical reference to the New Zealand context, the often antagonistic relationship between the ‘journalistic field’ and the ‘academic field’. I examine how academic identities are sometimes represented ‘fantasmatically’ (Glynos and Howarth, 2007) in journalistic discourse and explore the contradictions between journalism’s official commitment to democratic values and the desire of at least some journalists to silence or lampoon academic voices, or insist that theoretical reflection is somehow incompatible with good journalism. The articulation of particular journalistic identities is contextualised with reference to the more ‘objective’ logic of the New Zealand journalistic field and, in particular, the structuring of its concrete relationship with the academic field through journalism education programmes. Although the culturally sedimented practices precluding the possibility of a different inter-field dynamic are considerable, I conclude by ‘visualising’ an alternative relationship, one constituted, on all sides, by what Williams Connolly (2005) characterises as a properly democratic ethos of ‘agonistic respect’ across difference. Introduction and context On March 21 2006, The Dominion Post – New Zealand’s second biggest selling and Wellington-based daily newspaper – published a characteristically polemical piece by its self-styled ‘Curmudgeon’ columnist, Karl Du Fresne. Headlined ‘An assassin in academia’, the column formulated a very barbed and, no doubt to some, quite comical reproach of a recently published press release by Massey University management lecturer, Craig Prichard (for more on the logic of Prichard’s intervention as a critical management studies scholar, see Bridgman, 2007). The context of the press release was the immediate aftermath of the publisher Fairfax’s landmark purchase of the online auction website, Trade Me, which, in keeping with an archetypal new economy success story (Prichard, Boon, Bill and Jones, Studies in Language & Capitalism 3/4, 2008: 161 – 180 162 2006), started out from modest beginnings to become ‘New Zealand’s leading internet business’ (Fairfax, 2006). Straying from the dominant media construction of the sale as a national triumph, Prichard (2006) characterized it instead as an ‘opportunity lost’ for New Zealand. Citing the agricultural co-operative movement as an historical antecedent, he argued that, rather than privately transferring the wealth to eleven recipients, the $700m generated by the sale should have been ‘creatively distributed’ among the site’s large community of users. Prichard recognised that Sam Morgan, the founder of Trade Me, and his fellow investors deserved a ‘healthy return for their hard work and investment’. However, appropriating a demotic local idiom, he queried ‘whether this kind of [private] distribution of value really amounted to “a fair go” for all those involved in creating the value that the sale realizes’. Du Fresne’s rebuttal was fierce. In a kind of hand-me-down version of the anti-theory polemics articulated by people like Windschuttle (2000), he responded with an ad hominem attack against not only Prichard but also Foucault and Marx. The ‘previously unheard’ of Prichard was characterised, in a distinctly kiwi metaphor, as a ‘tall poppy assassin’ with a ‘distrust’ and ‘envy’ of those who succeed in business. The ‘intrigued’ Du Fresne recalls how, after Googling Prichard, he: stumbled into a morass of impenetrable academic mumbo-jumbo liberally sprinkled with reverent references to Michel Foucault – the leftwing French philosopher succinctly described by Bob Brockie in this paper recently as a fruitcake – and Karl Marx, whose theories probably killed more people in the 20th century than any other single factor (Du Fresne, 2006). The relevant section of the column ended by positing what it characterized as a ‘stark contrast’ between the entrepreneurial brilliance of Morgan and Prichard: safe and smug in his taxpayer-funded academic post, who as far as I can tell hasn’t contributed a damned thing to the country’s well-being and, indeed, seems bent on undermining those who do (Du Fresne, 2006). This paper wants to situate Du Fresne’s column as a specific Aotearoa New Zealand articulation of a well established antagonism between journalism and the academy (Zelizer, 2004; Macdonald; 2006; Gasher, 2005). As many have observed (Reese & Cohen, 2000; Turner, 2000; Skinner, Gasher & Compton, 2001; Hirst, 2008), this antagonism is especially fraught when what are often pejoratively coded as the ‘theoretical’ imperatives of the academy are seen as encroaching on the ‘practical’ disposition of journalism. Backgrounded Democracy, the Academic Field and the (New Zealand) Journalistic Habitus 163 by these antagonisms, there are at least five ways of responding to Du Fresne’s attack. First, one could conclude that he is simply representative of himself. Indeed, one could conceivably argue (this is certainly the assumption that animates the internal logic of his column), that, despite the fact that Du Fresne is the former editor of a national newspaper, his overtly conservative and neoliberal identity is a minority one within mainstream New Zealand journalism. Second, one could take Du Fresne’s ‘curmudgeonly’ identity at face value and, if one was sufficiently qualified to do so (the fact that he isn’t qualified clearly doesn’t dissuade De Fresne from offering a confident diagnosis of Prichard’s psychological disposition), formulate an individuated psychoanalytical explanation for his hostility. Third, one could invoke a ‘freedom of the press’ argument, as many journalists instinctively do, and read such invective as confirmation of the vibrancy of New Zealand’s media democracy, thus treating anyone who frets about the ethical and ideological implications of such exchanges as ‘thin-skinned’ and in need of ‘toughening up’. Fourth, one could formulate a straightforward political economy diagnosis and observe that, as a Fairfax employee (the Dominion Post is one of a stable of New Zealand newspapers owned by the publisher), Du Fresne was ‘putting the boot into’ someone who reflected badly on his employer. Or, fifth, one could simply conclude that Du Fresne is ‘right’ and that no more needs to be said about the matter. There is no doubt some explanatory value in the first four responses. Yet I want to treat Du Fresne’s column as a platform for a more expansive dialectical analysis that argues it can be read as a ‘fantasmatic’ articulation of an antagonism to academic identities that is a more general attribute of the New Zealand journalistic ‘habitus’. By ‘fantasmatic’, I mean, most simply, a logic of ideological fantasy, which Glynos and Howarth (2007) conceptualize, following Žižek (1989), as the affective force that ‘grips’ a subject’s identification with a particular discourse. Two points centring Glynos and Howarth’s account (also see Glynos 2001) of the fantasmatic are worth noting cursorily. First, they stress that ‘for something to function fantasmatically.... it needs to come to embody a general public’s view, or at least the relevant audience’s view’ of the particular individual or group (p.174) – in this case, academics who explicitly position their identity as ‘critical’ or ‘theoretical’. Second, they stress how the fantasmatic ‘typically isn’t articulated explicitly’, but is, more commonly, implicit in a particular discourse. In this respect, Du Fresne’s overt antagonism to the figure of the critical academic can be understood as atypical, because it articulates a discourse that, although latent, typically ‘resists [explicit] public official disclosure’ (p. 148) in the mundane interactions (Rowe & Brass, 2008) between journalism and the academy. I am suggesting that it can justifiably be called a ‘fantasmatic’ representation, because it voices a political-cultural disposition that, in my assessment, is present and felt, yet often unsaid Studies in Language & Capitalism 3/4, 2008: 161 – 180 164 (partly because it is shared and doesn’t need to be said), in the mainstream New Zealand journalistic field. My understanding of ‘habitus’ follows Bourdieu, who, in Wacquant’s reformulation, conceptualizes it as a description of how: Cumulative exposure to certain social conditions instils in individuals an ensemble of durable and transposable dispositions that internalize the necessities of the extant social environment, inscribing inside the organism the patterned inertia and constraints of external reality (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 13) Although the formal discussion of Bourdieu’s work here is skeletal, it is important to stress that the category of habitus cannot be separated from the other conceptual dimensions of Bourdieu’s work, in particular the category of ‘the field’. If habitus can be described as way of indexing a ‘socialized subjectivity’ or posture (ibid, 126), then field is a heuristic attempt to capture how group subjectivities are dialectally structured by, and simultaneously structuring, what Bourdieu calls a ‘network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions’ (Benson & Neveu, 2005, p. 3). The category of habitus is operationalized here in a methodologically limited way, because the dynamic formation of New Zealand journalists’ subjectivities clearly can not be reduced to specifically journalistic experiences. Nonetheless, it is still useful to speak of an analytically distinct journalistic habitus, because as Bourdieu observes: ‘Habitus being the social embodied, it is “at home” in the field it inhabits, it perceives it immediately as endowed with meaning and interest’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 128). The focus of my analysis is centred on the relationship between the New Zealand journalistic field and the academic field, particularly with respect to how they intersect in the structural organisation of journalism education. The wider network of capitalist and liberal democratic field relations that structure the hegemonic configuration of the particular inter-field relationship is not explored in any detail, though they do background the subsequent discussion of the relationship between democracy, journalism and education. The paper does not purport to offer a comprehensive assessment of the particular inter-field relationship; its register is more of a conceptually experimental essay, rather than a detailed theoretical or empirical treatment. However, it should hopefully be clear that the dynamics and logics of the journalistic field/academic field relationship cannot be understood in isolation from a wider network of neoliberalized field relations or, to use a discourse theoretical vocabulary, a more general discussion of how the ‘the social’ has been ‘filled’ or ‘hegemonized’ (Laclau, 2005; Glynos and Howarth 2007). Of particular background Democracy, the Academic Field and the (New Zealand) Journalistic Habitus 165 importance here, from a political economy of media perspective, is the market-driven, deregulated and duopolistic character of the New Zealand media system, (Hope, 2005), which has been described as one of the most open and corporate-driven communication markets in the world (Herman & McChesney, 1997). The argument is developed in four distinct parts and shares a broad conceptual affinity with arguments that have been made in other national contexts (Skinner, et al, 2001; Gasher, 2005; Macdonald, 2006; Garman, 2005). First, I examine a second journalistic text that is articulated from a field position directly opposed to Du Fresne. Second, my analysis of both journalistic texts is contextualised with reference to the ‘objective’ structures of the academic field that most obviously relate to the embryonic formation and inculcation of journalistic identities. Third, I discuss the question of democracy and probe some of the ironies, but also the implicit counter-hegemonic possibilities, behind journalism’s putative identification with a ‘democratic’ ideology. Fourth ̧ I draw on William Connolly’s (2005) account of pluralism to ‘visualise’ a normative alternative to the current hegemonic models of media democracy. I end by emphasising the importance of the academic field as a space for nurturing a subjectivity of democratic possibility, while simultaneously recognizing the combination of economic, cultural and institutional factors inhibiting its articulation. ‘Theory’ is the problem The second text I want to look at is by Chris Trotter, who writes a Fairfax-syndicated column under the banner identity of ‘From the left’. As the branding suggests, Trotter articulates an identity that, within the relational logics of the mainstream journalistic field, is the political opposite of his corporate stablemate De Fresne. Nonetheless, Trotter’s Dominion Post column of August 1