Field Theory and Media Production: A bridge-building strategy

Pierre Bourdieu’s book On Television (1998a), which was published in French in 1996, was an essayistic and critical analysis of the French journalistic field, of the power of journalism and journalists and of the professional ideology guiding the journalistic field, such as a constant drive for ‘scoops’. Before that, Bourdieu had not been addressing media production specifically but had worked with more general questions of cultural production and power. The Field of Cultural production: Essays on Art and Literature (Bourdieu, 1993) and later The Rules of Art (Bourdieu, 1996) present empirical research and essays on art and literature forming a field analysis of the inner workings of small-scale art production; and the seminal work, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Bourdieu, 2003), is a mapping of the social space of cultural consumption, proposing a critique of the notion of ‘taste’ and its (naturalized) relation to power. Other work—for instance, Homo Academicus (Bourdieu, 1988), an analysis of the academic field in France—is also important to media production studies as it unfolds and operationalizes the concepts of field, habitus and capital in the context of cultural production.