“The truth of what’s happening” How Tibetan exile media develop and maintain journalistic authority

Tibet is one of the most restrictive places in the world for press freedom, with information online and offline tightly controlled and censored by the Chinese government. Foreign correspondents are restricted from travelling to and reporting in Tibetan areas, while Tibetans who act as sources are often persecuted. Despite this level of repression, Tibetans still find ways to tell the rest of the world what is happening in Tibet. This paper explores how it is possible to authoritatively report on events in one of the world’s most restrictive places for press freedom. Instead of relying on a single individual or news organisation, we find that reporting is conducted through journalistic networks consisting of sources in Tibet, Tibetan exile journalists, and source intermediaries called ‘communicators’. Based on fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with Tibetan journalists and communicators we explore how they develop and maintain journalistic authority, while being in exile and having to deal with severe constraints to press freedom.

Achieving discourse truth in doing affiliated news interviews

In affiliated news interviews, interviewees are both reporters and commentators, thus often caught in the dilemma of whether to interpret or report. Based on Stephen J. A. Ward’s theory of pragmatic objectivity, this article responds to this question by proposing a concept of discourse truth and applying it to the analysis of affiliated news interviews collected from BBC News at Ten. It is found that journalists in such interviews tend to achieve a sense of discourse truth through three primary discourse practices, including achieving journalistic authority, emphasizing authenticity of news and displaying journalistic neutrality. These practices are in turn realized through a variety of discourse strategies such as identity credentials, personalization, modality, third-party attribution and metadiscourse expressions. The results show that objectivity can be maintained through discourse truth, even when news is interpreted. Discourse truth can reflect the authenticity of talk to some extent. It is, however, not the fact itself, but the reality constructed in the news.

Transparency as metajournalistic performance: The New York Times’ Caliphate podcast and new ways to claim journalistic authority

Transparency is increasingly touted as a strategic tool for elevating journalistic authority. Despite this push, literature has overlooked how transparency can be utilized for authority purposes in audiovisual artefacts. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative thematic analysis of The New York Times’ podcast Caliphate to examine how transparency is strategically weaponized to stake a claim to journalistic authority. Based on the premise that transparency is a metajournalistic performance – a type of journalism about journalism that is performative in acting on people’s perception of journalistic authority – we identify three of those metajournalistic performances in the podcast: Revealing the journalistic process, Constructing the reporter’s persona and Reaffirming the journalistic culture. Together, they exhibit a form of self-celebratory transparency that strategically performs boundary-setting, definitional control and legitimization functions, in a bid to impress audiences and have them recognize the journalistic authority of the Caliphate reporters and The Times. We conclude with the implications of these strategic performances of transparency. First, how it can be used by reporters to reinstate verticality over audiences. Second, how the journalistic culture (norms, values, practices, etc.) can be transparently projected outward (to the public) or inward (to the journalist themself) to elevate authority – a new concept for journalism studies. Third, how metajournalistic performances of transparency may reveal power dynamics within the journalistic field.

The Case Against the Doctors: Gender, Authority, and Critical Science Writing in the 1960s

In the 1960s, widespread popular-cultural deference to the authority of science and medicine in the United States began to wane as a generation of journalists and activists reevaluated and criticized researchers and physicians. This article uses the career of feminist journalist Barbara Seaman to show the role that the emerging genre of critical science writing played in this broader cultural shift. First writing from her position as a mother, then as the wife of a physician, and finally as a credentialed science writer, Seaman advanced through distinct categories of journalistic authority throughout the 1960s. An investigation of Seaman’s early years in the profession also vividly demonstrates the roles that gender and professional expertise played in both constricting and permitting new forms of critique during this era.