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Grey Collar Journalism: The Social Relations of News Production
Hirst, Martin (2002-02-01). Grey Collar Journalism: The Social Relations of News Production PhD Thesis, School of Social Sciences and Liberal Studies, Charles Sturt University.
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MHirst-PhD.pdf
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MHirst-PhD.pdf |
application/pdf |
1.16MB |
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| Author(s) |
Hirst, Martin
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| Thesis Title |
Grey Collar Journalism: The Social Relations of News Production
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| School, Centre or Institute |
School of Social Sciences and Liberal Studies
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| Institution |
Charles Sturt University
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| Publication date |
2002-02-01
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| Thesis type |
PhD Thesis
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| Subjects |
400101 Journalism
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| Abstract/Summary |
"On any meaningful notion of 'class' as a concept related to the social relations deriving from the system of production in a Capitalist society like ours, journalists are not
'middle class' ... they are not particularly well paid, their union and their industrial actions are, for all intents and purposes, the same as any other group of unionists." Keith Windschuttle
1998, p.351 The purpose of my Doctoral thesis - Grey Collar Journalism: The social relations of news production - is to analyse the role of journalists as public intellectuals (Louw 2001) and to do
so from an understanding of newswork as a labour process. Along the way I have developed a critical appraisal of various theoretical approaches to the study of journalism. Broadly speaking this
thesis is in the discipline of the sociology of journalism, but it is without question a crossdisciplinary thesis and necessarily so. In the first three chapters I develop and explain what I mean
by Grey Collar Journalism and the 'journalist-as-intellectual'. This section of the thesis articulates what I call the 'labour theory of journalism' to further explain the ambivalent nature (Hallin
1994; Franklin 1997) of modern journalism. I argue here that this ambivalence in modern journalism is reflected in the contradictory relationship between grey collar newsworkers and the
Nation-State. This is expressed through what I have called the 'emotional dialectic' of newswork and the 'dialectic of the front-page'. It is this labour theory of journalism that brings forth the
concept of the grey collar journalists, which I define as a cohort of newsworkers who occupy a contradictory class location - broadly speaking the 'new middle class' to which the category of
'newsworker' belongs (Callinicos 1989b). Grey collar journalists are also public intellectuals in the Gramscian sense of being the producers and circulators of various ideas in civil society -
snippets of ideology and social science - in the service of either of the major contending classes: Labour and Capital. The labour theory of journalism is then employed in a study of Australian
political journalism to identify the social forces that create the conditions in which grey collar journalists operate. These are defined and analysed as the economic, class, cultural, political,
historical and social relations of production that underpin the contradictory and ambivalent "emotional attitudes" (Orwell 1988, p.9) of newsworkers. In the next few chapters, Australian examples
are illustrated in order to critically examine the highly politicised and culturally-mystified relationship between journalism as a set of social practices and the important centres of power in a
monopoly capitalist society - in principal the ruling class and the state apparatus. This development of the grey collar thesis grounds a class-based critique of the liberal-democratic theory of
the media as 'Fourth Estate'. In particular, I critically discuss changes to the MEAA Code of Ethics that were accepted in 1998, after lengthy debate in the union's ranks and in the media. The
final chapters of the thesis test the explanatory power of the grey collar thesis against recent attempts to theorise journalism from a cultural studies perspective and the so-called 'media wars'
debates of the late 1990s. In particular I challenge John Hartley's assertion that we are now in the age of postmodern journalism.
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| Keyword(s) |
Labour theory
Journalists
Journalism
Media workers
Fourth estate
Public intellectuals
Newspapers
Social class
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