Making News Necessary: How Journalism Resists Alternative Media's Challenge*

Abstract

News coverage following Al Gore and George W. Bush's appearances on the Oprah Winfrey Show during the 2000 presidential campaign shows journalism asserting its authority to manage political discourse despite competition from alternative media. Analysis using Foucault's concepts of knowledge, power, and discipline reveals journalism affirming its continuing relevance and integrates insights from the framing and paradigm repair traditions. Journalists rejected Oprah as political discourse but reframed its elements to meet news criteria established by institutional journalism. Using negative stereotypes of women as political actors, journalists also disciplined Winfrey's “mostly female” audience for failing to adequately enact citizenship. Journalists thus both reasserted authority to manage political discourse and set standards for citizenship that positioned journalism as necessary to democracy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.