Journalism, history and the politics of popular culture
Hartley, John (2009) Journalism, history and the politics of popular culture. In Allan, Stuart (Ed.) The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism Studies. Routledge, London, pp. 13-24. (In Press)
Official URL: http://www.routledgecommunication.com/books/The-Ro...
Abstract
I argue that a divergence between popular culture as “object” and “subject” of journalism emerged during the nineteenth century in Britain. It accounts not only for different practices of journalism, but also for differences in the study of journalism, as manifested in journalism studies and cultural studies respectively. The chapter offers an historical account to show that popular culture was the source of the first mass circulation journalism, via the pauper press, but that it was later incorporated into the mechanisms of modern government for a very different purpose, the theorist of which was Walter Bagehot. Journalism’s polarity was reversed – it turned from “subjective” to “objective.” The paper concludes with a discussion of YouTube and the resurgence of self-made representation, using the resources of popular culture, in current election campaigns. Are we witnessing a further reversal of polarity, where popular culture and self-representation once again becomes the “subject” of journalism?
Citations:

Citation counts are sourced monthly from Scopus and Web of Science citation databases.
These databases contain citations from different subsets of available publications and different time periods and thus the citation count from each is usually different. Some works are not in either database and no count is displayed. Scopus includes citations from articles published in 1996 onwards, and Web of Science generally from 1980 onwards.
Citations counts from the Google Scholar™ indexing service can be viewed at the linked Google Scholar™ search.
Export: EndNote | Dublin Core | BibTeX
Staff only: HERDC collection form
Repository Staff Only: item control page