The Civil Power of the News
Description
This landmark book is concerned with the civil power of the news. This power can be seen in the ways the news engages with public sentiment through a focus on three invariant civil concerns: identity, legitimacy and risk. The book analyses how news stories engage with these concerns to make civil and anti-civil judgements, which influence public sentiment and determine the boundaries we place and maintain around the society we live in. Through historical and contemporary examples of this boundary shaping and maintenance, The Civil Power of the News presents a bold and original account of the architecture of news, the influence it has on our conceptions of civility, and, ultimately, the power it wields.
Reviews / Votes
The Civil Power of the News is an extraordinary work, one that deserves to be widely read, widely discussed, and widely reviewed. Jackie Harrison advances a new model of how journalism can create but also undermine civil-democratic power. She illustrates this rigorous conceptual argument with an empirically rich and morally compelling case study of Victorian crime that reads like a detective novel. (Jeffrey C. Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, Yale University, USA)
"Original in its conceptualization . sophisticated in its methodological approach . with a glimmer of hope for the civil potential of journalism." (María Luengo Cruz, Associate Professor of Journalism, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
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Content
Chapter 1 Introduction to Part 1.- Chapter 2 The Civil Ideal of News.- Chapter 3 The Civil Ideal of News and Political and Commercial Reality.- Chapter 4 Newsrooms and the News Cycle.- Chapter 5 Introduction to Part 2: A Practical Demonstration of the Civil Power of the News Through an Analysis of the First British Railway Murder 1864.- Chapter 6 The Reporting of the Murder and the Invariant Civil Concern of Identity.- Chapter 7 The Reporting of the Murder and the Invariant Civil Concern of Legitimacy.- Chapter 8 The Reporting of the Murder and the Invariant Civil Concern of Risk.- Chapter 9 The Reporting of the Murder as Type 3 Civil Boundary Maintenance: the rejection of change and the endorsement of the status quo in civil society.- Chapter 10 Résumé.