The political Field, the Social Science Field, and the Journalistic Field

Abstract

Translated into Portuguese for the first time, this text is the result of a university lecture delivered by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in Lyon, France. In his argument, the sociologist develops the hypothesis that the journalistic field is becoming increasingly heteronomous, subjected to the rules and constraints of economics and politics. With the dominance of the commercial pole over the pure pole of the field, journalism imposes its constraints on all other fields, particularly cultural production fields such as social sciences, philosophy, etc., and the political field. Bourdieu’s discussion of the media, more widely debated in Brazilian academic circles following the publication of On Television (1998), reflects his growing interest in the journalistic field during his public and theoretical interventions in the 1990s—a period when the sociologist employed his sociological framework to critique neoliberal domination in symbolic production fields.