Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Terms of Choice: Uncertainty, Journalism,

and Crisis
Barbie Zelizer
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

This article considers whether thinking about journalism’s present set of challenges is best
served by the notion of “crisis.” It argues that adopting such a notion to explain a diverse set
of technological, political, economic, social, occupational, moral, and legal circumstances
misses an opportunity to recognize how contingent and differentiated the futures of journal-
ism might be. It also raises critical questions about how institutions deal with uncertainty
at their core, obscuring a fuller understanding of the permutations that get eclipsed by per-
ceiving crisis as a unitary phenomenon.

Keywords: Journalism, Crisis, Uncertainty, Discourse.

doi:10.1111/jcom.12157

Over 2 centuries ago, the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that bad times
have a scientific value because they are occasions a good learner would not miss. The
role of challenges in today’s complicated institutional landscape echoes Emerson’s sen-
timents, for they prompt us to pause, reorient, continue doing what we always did, or
change direction. Acting as ruptures of continuity and high points on the continuum
of everyday practice, challenges provide opportunities to regroup and recast the givens
that orient action.
What happens, however, when a sense of challenge looms so large that it takes
over, hardening the perception of challenge into crisis? Such is the case with journal-
ism today. We hear much about the crisis facing contemporary news, which by many
accounts is losing its very foundations. Journalism, it is often said, is on its way out,
with the present crisis pushing it forcefully out the door.
The discursive shape of this claim deserves consideration. What is gained and lost
by explaining the conditions facing journalism as a situation of “crisis”? Though the
intent here is neither to make small of the details on the ground nor minimize the
precariousness experienced by journalism, it is useful to consider the invocation of
“crisis” as a term of choice and tease out its attributes as an example of institutional

Corresponding author: Barbie Zelizer; e-mail: bzelizer@asc.upenn.edu

888 Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association

B. Zelizer Terms of Choice

response to uncertainty. While scholars have suggested examining this discourse’s

contours, doing so forcefully may help us better appraise what is being eclipsed by
lamentations of a futureless horizon for journalism.
This article argues that much of today’s response to the crisis of journalism travels
a well-tread path. Following discursive cues set in place long ago to a now outdated
and spatially narrow notion understanding of institutional disarray and of what was
required to control it, the notion of crisis that has prevailed among many observers
rests on particular temporalities and geographies at the core of its imaginary. Invoking
“crisis” as a way to explain journalism’s predicament thus misses an opportunity to
recognize how contingent and differentiated the futures of journalism might be. It also
raises critical questions about how institutions deal with uncertainty at their core.

On uncertainty, modernity, and crisis

One widely shared observation about the contemporary age is that it is riddled with
uncertainty (Prigogine, 1997; Santos, 1992). Theorizing about current conditions has
promoted notions of risk (Beck, 1992), contingency (Rorty, 1989), indeterminancy
(Eisenstadt, 1995), and liquidity (Bauman, 2000), all of which underscore a lack of
certitude. The instability at issue here can obscure the subtle differences in the terms
used to describe it: O’Malley (2004), for instance, noted that risk offers a way of gov-
erning through objective and calculable measures, uncertainty via the incalculable
conventions of judgment, rule of thumb, and guesswork. But all provide a description
of unsettled conditions, against which some response is presumed to be of value.
Given modernity’s insistence on the rational and reasoned ordering of knowledge,
uncertainty raises particular problems for its residuals, and in many cases its intru-
sion into the social and physical world obscures the expected orderly arrangement
of symbolic and material goods. This is particularly so with institutions that evolved
in specific ways in modernity’s wake—government, education, the legal system, and
eventually journalism. As Readings (1996, pp. 14–15) said 2 decades ago about the
university, it became modern when all of its activities were “organized in view of
a single regulatory idea.” The adoption of one unified principle emerged as key to
the smooth functioning of modernity’s institutional accouterments, which were to be
guided by a singular progression—“whether it be the principle of human reason or
enlightenment, technical rationality or power over nature … a single story of unfold-
ing potential” (Mitchell, 2002, p. 9).
Uncertainty’s ubiquitous presence today raises fundamental questions about
future sustainability, with the environment, the market, and global security but
some of its central challenges. As Wallerstein (2004, p. 39) noted, “scientists are now
able to consider seriously for the first time the commonsense proposition that they
had so rigorously rejected: that the social world is intrinsically uncertain.” Though
uncertainty has been celebrated—Bernstein (1998, p. 229) famously heralded its
facilitation of creative human agency that “makes us free”—it rests upon a degree
of random variability, standing out “from those ways of thinking and governing that
assume a determinate world” (O’Malley, 2004, p. 14). In such a light, institutions find

Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association 889

Terms of Choice B. Zelizer

themselves facing obstacles for which they are ill prepared. The routine function-
ing on which institutions rest goes by the wayside when uncertainty surfaces, and
journalism here is no exception.
The invocation of “crisis” offers a useful discursive response to the angst generated
by uncertainty (Wallerstein, 2004). With modernity “staged as that which is singular,
original, present, and authoritative” (Mitchell, 2002, p. 24), the choice of “crisis” as a
term to describe contemporary challenges fits the modern sensibility because it helps
keep uncertainty at bay.
Though today there are many ways to think about crisis, at the heart of most per-
spectives is the aspiration that one can reach its other side. In their recent discussion of
Europe’s current economic woes, for instance, Bauman and Bordoni (2014) described
a state of contemporary paralysis that has made the region a laboratory for survival
everywhere: As Europe will resolve the impact of current austerity measures, so will
other regions follow in its stead. In fact, the prospect of overcoming crisis is rooted in
the intellectual project of the Enlightenment, when stability, order, and reason arose
as targets of protection and nurturance, and anything that disrupted that relationship
needed to be contained. In Bauman’s words (Bauman & Bordoni, 2014, p. 7), when
discussing “crisis of whatever nature … we convey first the feeling of uncertainty, of
our ignorance of the direction to which the affairs are about to turn—and secondly
the urge to intervene.” If change unfolds too quickly or a challenge grows too large, the
tendency has been to minimize the uncertainty it brings. Unwieldy disruption, in this
view, needed management because it undermined the smooth functioning of soci-
ety’s institutions. Adjacent to larger tendencies toward what Hacking (1990) called
the “probablization” of the Western imagination, controlling crisis was thus seen as
a useful offset to an indeterminate future. And yet, as Koselleck (1959/1988) argued
over half a century ago, invoking the term “crisis” in response to uncertain conditions
is problematic. Its invocation has naturalized many of its constituent details, and con-
tingencies of a geographic and historical nature often fade out when we use it today.
Crisis is defined as a point at which “established patterns of dealing with struc-
tural contradictions, their crisis-tendencies and strategic dilemmas no longer work
as expected, and … when continued reliance thereon may aggravate matters” (Jessop,
2013, p. 8). It provides a “moment of transition from a previous condition to a new
one … which is necessary to growth, a prelude to an improvement in a different status,
a decisive step forward” (Bordoni, in Bauman & Bordoni, 2014, p. 3). Characterized
by some combination of perceived suddenness, disruption, urgency, loss, and the need
for external assistance in order to offset helplessness and reach recovery, crisis seems
to possess an extended set of attributes. Yet, each of them is easily debatable when
probed closely: Is a crisis that ensues following long periods of neglect as sudden as
we make it out to be? Why is disruption more deserving of attention than what pre-
cedes it? Do environments without the capacity to learn through mistakes or problems
escape discussion about crisis? What precisely is so attractive about the promise of
a noncrisis moment? These questions, and others, begin to hint at how partial and
precarious the idea of crisis may in fact be.

890 Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association

B. Zelizer Terms of Choice

Though work by Dean (1999), Hacking (1990), and O’Malley (2004), among oth-
ers, underscored how elastic and variable are the conditions associated with uncer-
tainty, a number of patterned expectations nonetheless emerge around crisis’ invo-
cation. These expectations—discursive conventions typically used when addressing
complicated institutional contours—rule in and out certain ways of talking about an
institution (Mumby, 1988; Potter & Wetherell, 1987). Members of an institution thus
drive processes of institutionalization by producing “influential texts that change the
discourses on which institutions depend” (Phillips, Lawrence, & Hardy, 2004, p. 648).
In this regard, institutional “power and politics are frequently exercised through the
discourse of [its] members” (Mayr, 2008, p. 1).
In that much about institutional workings is connected to modernity, it is not sur-
prising that modernity has a lasting impact on institutional life. Weber (1914/1978)
was among the first to point out that institutions use language to continually legiti-
mate themselves, and that view has been supported in different ways over time (i.e.,
Barthes, 1977; Douglas, 1986; Foucault, 1980; Habermas, 1981; White, 1980). As such,
the term “crisis” emerges as a descriptor of institutional disarray because it has util-
ity for those invoking it: Thus, discussions about journalism do not tend to reference
journalism and risk, uncertainty, noise, danger, chaos, or threat, even though all are
part of the institutional environments in which journalism finds itself. Instead the talk
of journalism’s current challenges has for many become the talk of crisis.
Examples of its invocation abound. Much of the crisis discourse is driven by jour-
nalists themselves (i.e., Brock, 2013; Lloyd, 2004; Starkman, 2014): A Google search
for “the end of journalism” yields 9.2 billion hits. Media critics and academics often
compound its centrality by adopting it whole, spawning titles such as Losing the News
(Jones, 2009), Can Journalism Be Saved? (Mersey, 2010), and The End of Journalism
(Charles & Stewart, 2011). Though, in one view, “most authors stop short of predicting
some sort of future equivalent of a journalistic nuclear winter” (Broersma & Peters,
2012, p. 2), they nonetheless focus pessimistically on incipient loss and its fallout.
Meyer (2006) and McChesney and Nichols (2010) independently predicated their pre-
dictions of widespread doom on the crisis of failing traditional business models, while
Fuller (2010) pointed to the changing audience relationship as a primary cause of con-
temporary malaise. Mindich (2005) read the disenchantment among young people
with the news as a fundamental threat to democratic process and journalism’s future
relevance. Framing the reigning pessimism most succinctly, McChesney and Pickard
(2011) famously asked, “will the last reporter please turn out the lights?” The negative
fallout from such reasoning should be clear: Not only have claims about journalism’s
crisis refracted the scholarly engagement with journalism and colored notions of jour-
nalism’s viability, but they have obscured a fuller understanding of the permutations
that get eclipsed by understanding crisis as a unitary phenomenon.
To be sure, the uniform repair to a simplified notion of crisis in journalism has
been challenged. Recent scholarship wrestling with the vagaries of current conditions
has been a useful corrective to the discursive appeal of a unitary crisis on the land-
scape. Peters and Broersma (2012), for instance, posited that journalism’s structural

Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association 891

Terms of Choice B. Zelizer

foundations necessarily refract ensuing challenges and (2014) that journalism’s digital
storytelling shifts its institutional workings. Van der Haak, Parks, and Castells (2012)
unpacked the impact of traditional business models, arguing that there is “a crisis
of the media industry, but not necessarily a crisis of journalism” (p. 2924). Ander-
son (2011) saw journalists’ understandings of their audiences as central to achieving
greater stability. Schlesinger (2006) considered the impact of crisis on the link between
journalism and politics. Both Patterson (2013) and Stephens (2014) looked to jour-
nalism’s mindset as the primary route to achieving a more stable news environment.
Fenton (2010) and Anderson (2013) examined how technology shapes journalism,
while Alexander, Breese, and Luengo (2015), Downie and Schudson (2009), and Levy
and Nielsen (2010) all addressed uncertainty’s impact on the wide-ranging contours
of journalism’s future.
And yet, a simplified mode of describing journalism’s current challenges persists
in many quarters. Why is this so? Its adoption may be because “crisis,” as a lexical
term of choice, works in a productive fashion. It offers a particular way of editing
from the picture aspects of reality that are not deemed central to the claim being
made and focusing on what has the most strategic use-value. Following Fairclough’s
(1995, p. 55) work on “discursive simplification,” terms like “crisis” become a way
of lexically editing from the picture alternative realities in order to frame the sub-
ject of address in simplistic, familiar, and strategically useful ways. Though crisis is a
phenomenon with material dimensions—factories close, people die, infrastructures
collapse—it is shaped too by discourse: We name it, we flesh out its details with words,
we give it identity through comparison and analogy and metaphor. Hence, its resolu-
tion depends on “language, communication, and discourse” (de Rycker & Mohd Don,
2013, p. 1), used to predict and control whatever challenges have transpired. Using the
label of “crisis” thus helps turn murky and troublesome challenges into a controllable
phenomenon that can be identified, articulated, managed, and ultimately gotten rid
of. As a lexical choice, it thereby “strikes less fear” than its alternatives (Bordoni, in
Bauman & Bordoni, 2014, p. 3).

Responding to crisis
Specific conventions tend to surface repeatedly when the term “crisis” is used to
describe uncertainty. They involve three aspects of crisis—its time, space, and mode
of invocation. All three are employed strategically to better engage with instability in
a controlled fashion.
First, crisis invites a new temporal order. It divides time into before and after
moments, past and future (Koselleck, 1959/1988), with the crisis itself marking
varying degrees of distinctiveness between them. In this sense, crisis is positioned
as a temporally defined moment of transition. Though thinking about crisis often
involves more temporal gradation that this implies—O’Malley (2004, p. 18), for
instance, argued against seeing risk and uncertainty as a rigid binary, maintain-
ing that they regularly “blur, converge, or overlap,” while Douglas (1986, p. 19)
saw risk turning “uncertainties into probabilities”—its discussion in all cases

892 Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association

B. Zelizer Terms of Choice

becomes necessarily future-oriented. Framing uncertain circumstances as crisis helps

rationalize an altered definition of journalists as dependent primarily on on-site
presence and cell phones, for instance, or encourages an orientation to news that can
be easily funded by external sources. The linearity implicit in the relationship between
what has already happened and what will happen next positions crisis as something
that is identifiable, finite, can be grasped fully, treated, and ultimately controlled.
What crisis offers, then, is the possibility of closure.
Second, crisis tends to be seen in clear and tangible spatial terms. It is given an
agreed-upon beginning—the problem’s origin is somewhere locatable—and this
gives way to a degree of grounded causality. For example, the lack of public regard for
news might be seen as an extension of Murdoch’s Australian tabloid empire, while
the threat of physical harm to journalists might be associated with public strife in
Russia or the Middle East. Central here is some attempt to encapsulate a place where
the problem can be thought to originate or exist in an exaggerated fashion. Through
space, then, crisis introduces concreteness. Its ensuing tangibility makes it easier to
identify, articulate, and then manage the challenges it describes.
Third, when crisis is invoked, it is because some aspect of reality and expectations
of it are at cross-currents with each other. One might hope that journalism will
prevail, even though present conditions do not look promising. Those cross-currents
produce disorientation, an often intense anticipation of negative fallout. “What
went wrong” becomes the question to answer (Roitman, 2014). In this view, crisis
is seen as a problem. It upsets a default sense of settledness, where normal, routine
functioning, stability, and stasis are presumed ruffled by potentially damaging conse-
quences. Recognizing attributes of crisis in this way requires framing both the crisis
and its host landscape in unidimensional and formulaic ways. Routines and their
violations are reduced to their most common and simple denominators, while crisis
and its landscape are seen as more oppositional to and distinct from each other than
necessary—partisanship versus objectivity, old versus new media. The insistence
on binaries and on what went wrong between them produces a clear-cut scenario,
even as it precludes attention to what went right or to the various permutations in
between. In one view, “once virtually everything is perceived to be in more or less
unending crisis, the possibility arises that we are losing the capacity to discriminate
between social pathology or breakdown, on the one side, and social normality and
social order, on the other” (Holton, 1987, p. 503). Crisis, then, invites coherency, a
clear and often subjunctive vision of a hypothetical aspirational landscape that is
better than what is presently available, even if it does not faithfully represent it.
Together, these aspects of crisis’ invocation remind us that crisis always requires
a response. Letting it run its course does not work. Even stipulating that one is “in
crisis” already sets in motion certain patterned responses that push toward some kind
of resolution. This means that moving past crisis tends to be achieved by reaching
beyond normal collective boundaries and acting on an assumption that activities such
as reasoned action, deliberation, and civic engagement can help move the collective
to a more stable place. Usually this activity involves an appeal to known institutions

Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association 893

Terms of Choice B. Zelizer

or agencies, as opposed to emergent social movements, because they are perceived

untainted by crisis and thus able to offer interventions that prevent its spread or
recurrence. For instance, well-established NGOs might be called upon to provide
coverage of humanitarian disasters or recognized news organizations—Le Monde,
The Guardian—might be commended for developing devices for online photo veri-
fication. These attempts at resolution are needed to achieve some kind of “imagined
recovery” (Jessop, 2013), by which a landscape of stasis, order, and stability—along
the lines of that which is presumed to have existed precrisis—can be reinstated.
These three aspects of crisis—its time, space, and mode of invocation—are criti-
cal to establishing and maintaining what Roitman (2014, p. 11) identified as a “blind
spot” in the production of knowledge. Their offerings—closure, concreteness, and
coherency—combine to offset the uncertainty that challenges bring. Together, they
help make some things visible and other things invisible about precarious circum-
stances. They also facilitate a presumption of control over them. The contingencies
on which crisis rests thus necessarily fade to the background of its invocation, and
the imaginary pulled into play performs real advantages for those invoking it. Work-
ing on the assumption that if challenges can only be identified they will consequently
dissipate, little room remains for confronting the internal noise, incongruities, incon-
sistencies, and local situated particularities that constitute the landscape. And yet,
messiness is what crisis is all about.
Perhaps nowhere is this as much the case as with journalism, where messiness
drives multiple and often contradictory challenges. Evidenced by the various kinds of
journalism around the world, it facilitates their diverse interactions with a range of
political, economic, social, and legal systems (i.e., Josephi, 2010). This suggests that
uncertainty necessarily inhabits the landscape. It also suggests that “what is and what
is not a crisis is situated within the local context and within the meaning structures
invoked in these contexts … what might be considered a crisis in one situation may
not be considered a crisis in another” (Berkelaar & Dutta, 2007, p. 7). The term “crisis,”
then, may be missing what is most singular about the challenges it is being used to
describe.

Journalism in crisis
The current challenges facing journalism loom large. Politically, the news remains
under threat from right and left. Economically, old business models are in a free fall
while new alternatives have not yet solidified a pathway to recovery. Morally, scan-
dals and violations of ethical behavior keep public trust in the news media at all time
lows. Occupationally, the traditional view of what journalism should be—objective,
detached, balanced—no longer holds. And technologically, the rise and entrench-
ment of digital media make most explicit what journalism has always tried to keep
in its background—its problems with authoritative storytelling, separation from the
public, reluctant response to calls for transparency, cozying up to officialdom. In this
regard, the challenges facing journalism loom menacingly across all of its contours
and have prompted doomsday-sayers everywhere to predict journalism’s demise.

894 Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association

B. Zelizer Terms of Choice

The salience of crisis in journalism is problematic because, as with other insti-

tutions, it introduces an unwelcome uncertainty into its landscape. Like the origin
narratives of other institutions, much about journalism’s survival relies on conditions
uncomplicated by uncertainty. Journalism’s affinity with a certain kind of modernity,
it has been repeatedly said, expected it to advance rational, reasoned deliberation
through full and complete information relay. Its performance was to be gauged by
aspirations for clear judgment and reasoning, the efficacy of value-free information,
the accomplishment of impartial, balanced prose, and a belief in productive civic
engagement. In modernity’s eyes, journalism was to be a central driver of confident,
clear, and certain expectations of growing the civilized world (Zelizer, 2011). All of
this made journalism an inhospitable home for challenges that could not be managed.
Discourse about journalism instead pushed closure, clarity, consensus, and rational
processing as cues to ensure effective functioning of the news.
At the same time, much received discourse about journalism was born of a partic-
ular place that did not reflect journalism writ large. That place—the Anglo-American
imaginary—occupied a more central position in scholarly work than it did in the
world (i.e., Chalaby, 1996; Waisbord, 2000), and reliance on it removed from discus-
sion multiple modes of journalistic practice elsewhere. For example, despite repeated
attempts to link journalism and democracy in situations with little supporting evi-
dence, journalism is presumed to come up short when democracy does not support
it (Zelizer, 2013). Such narrowness makes it difficult to evaluate unexpected varia-
tions from the norm, as with the current backsliding against the 1990s democratic
reforms affecting much of journalism in Central and Eastern Europe or the current
manipulation of journalistic convention by the Islamic State.
Though the institutionalization of journalism studies arguably developed by
troubling the primarily Anglo-American, modern context that undergirds most of
journalism’s more entrenched narratives, pointing out their historic and geographic
specificity (i.e., Curran & Park, 2000), the reliance on a modern, Anglo-American
mindset nonetheless continues to constitute much of the first floor of the journalistic
imaginary, wherever and whenever it takes shape. In this regard journalism’s origin
narratives reflect broader entrenched patterns of scholarly knowledge acquisition
(Connell, 2007), where a reliance on tales that are temporally and spatially narrower
than circumstances on the ground produces simplification and scholarly certainty.
Like notions of progress, modernity, reason, or civic engagement—all of which are
assumed to ensue only if they follow a path set by the modern Western, generally
Anglo-American, world (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005)—“crisis” thus constitutes a term
that fits today’s imaginary. It has the kind of precision that offers a way out of murky,
uncontrollable challenges. For this reason, journalism’s present set of challenges is
not typically referenced as danger or threat or chaos, none of which provide a clear
and manageable exit strategy. Because those terms admit uncertainty in ways that
crisis tries to resolve, “crisis” remains the term of choice.
Much of this is reflected in journalism’s talk about itself, where institutional
adaptation to change and its articulation are a central part of identity formation

Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association 895

Terms of Choice B. Zelizer

and maintenance (i.e., Mayr, 2008; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). “Each institution has
its own set of speech events, its own differentiated settings and scenes, its cast of
participants, and its own norms for their combination … [constraining its members]
to act within that frame” (Fairclough, 1995, p. 38).
In this light, journalism’s origin narratives have driven a simplified understanding
of various challenges in its evolution. These challenges, often framed as crises, have
largely been seen as transformative turning points that threatened and then proved
journalism’s capacity to endure. Whether they involved different kinds of storytelling
over time (i.e., Bird, 1992) or journalism’s responses to different kinds of political
regimes (i.e., Hallin & Mancini, 2004), the story of the threats to journalism’s durabil-
ity has been largely told as a story of triumph. The capacity to endure has remained
front and center to the institutional discourses by which journalism distinguishes itself
from other modes of public expression.
Journalism’s origin narratives have also largely allowed small aspects of phenom-
ena to stand in for larger ones, regardless of how representative they might be. Such
a discursive pattern—commonly referenced as synecdoche—has played centrally in
journalism’s talk of itself. For example, models of objectivity have stood in for general
news practices in much of journalism’s discussion (Chalaby, 1996), while the state of
the newspaper industry has driven thinking about journalism across all technological
platforms (McChesney & Pickard, 2011).
This double-cued discursive tradition—collapsing challenges into a resolvable cri-
sis and taking one aspect of journalism to stand in for the whole—is playing out
too in many academic discussions of journalism’s present circumstances. Recurrent
claims about journalism’s predicament tend to follow well-traveled cues: The “cri-
sis in journalism” is largely discussed from a modern, Anglo-American imaginary;
particular aspects—its business model or uneven moral standing—stand in for jour-
nalism’s future writ large; and a singular and narrowed version of that future is seen
as identifiable, shared, and imminent. In such a vein, the rationale behind journal-
ism’s predicted end often rests on only part of the full picture of journalism; yet that
rationale is applied to prognoses about the enterprise as a whole (i.e., McChesney &
Nichols, 2010; Shirky, 2009).
Structurally, these discursive responses—seeing crisis as resolvable and over-
comable, as in the past, or seeing crisis as destructive and apocalyptic, as in the
present—reflect a similar logic. Both are too quick to collapse the messiness of
interrelated challenges into something that can be controlled, or not. Discursive
framing thus constitutes a ground from which to wrestle some degree of certainty
into a situation fundamentally rife with indeterminancy.
This bears consideration. For if we look both back and around—that is, look back
in time and around in space—beyond the temporal and spatial vantage points from
which these claims are being made, it is evident that there is both more and less
similarity—more similarity at other points in time, less similarity at other points in
space. Both underscore the same point: “Crisis” may not be the most productive lexical
choice for thinking about current conditions.

896 Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association

B. Zelizer Terms of Choice

Time, space, and the crisis in journalism

Though some contemporary scholars argue that the obsolescence of old media is
premature and that new and old media exist in a relationship of symbiosis and com-
plementarity (i.e., Davis, 2012; Neuberger & Nuembergk, 2010), a growing number of
observers, many in the Anglo-American world, maintain that new media are render-
ing the old irrelevant. While the technological aspects of journalism’s current chal-
lenges are only part of what comprises current notions of crisis, they are a useful
launch pad from which to discuss invocations of the term across time and space.
The precise parameters of crisis differ by location, but in many places, including the
Anglo-American imaginary, the technological landscape of today’s news piggybacks
on the instability created by other sources of turbulence. In these settings, the ascent of
new media has become a warning sign about journalism in all of its complexity, driv-
ing the discourse on crisis. This makes technology a fruitful reflector for considering
the discursive patterns associated with journalism’s anticipated demise.

Time, journalism, and crisis

Discourse about journalism from other points in time invites a consideration of other
moments of technological transformation. Here it is easy to see that the response to
and alarm about the changing technological parameters of digital media are not new
but instead repeat performances.
Though such performances take on a particular tenor by location, the centrality
of the Anglo-American narrative in thinking about journalism’s future enhances the
relevance of a closer consideration of the U.S. case. Though other comparisons eas-
ily could be drawn that would take on characteristics relevant to other locations, in
the U.S. context two moments of relevance from the last century come to mind—the
radio/press wars of the 1920s and 1930s and the coming of television in the 1950s and
1960s. Occurring roughly three decades from each other, each set of circumstances
highlighted an emergent medium that threatened to irretrievably change the jour-
nalistic landscape as then recognized. Each, significantly, drew upon larger political,
economic, and social circumstances across which the use of technology was seen to
prevail. Finally, most pertinent to this discussion, each failed to deliver on the threat
as expected at the time. Again, what follows details how these technologies unfolded
in the United States, and different versions of their reception can be found elsewhere.
The radio press wars of the 1920s and 1930s reveal a scenario that calls to mind
today’s ascent of new media—the simultaneous excitement it produced among its
enthusiasts and the angst it generated among old media practitioners and their
observers. The arrival of radio generated a “sense of awe” about the new technology
(Douglas, 1987, p. 304). Outlook magazine called the medium a “new social force”
of unity (Radio, 1924, p. 465). Expected to diversify the voices through which the
news would be delivered, broadening its platforms across class, race, and gender
(Douglas, 1987; Hilmes, 1997), radio, said one commentator, would achieve “the
task of making us feel together, think together, live together” (Kaempffert, 1924,
p. 772). Cast as the “agent of American democracy and altruism,” accommodating

Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association 897

Terms of Choice B. Zelizer

different modes of authoritative storytelling and playing upon the idealization of

broadcaster as public servants, the medium was “portrayed as a democratic agent,
leveling class differences, making politicians more accountable to the people, and
spreading education” (Douglas, 1987, pp. 320–321).
At the same time, many journalists regarded radio as a professional joke. Dis-
rupting a longstanding link between the wire services and the newspapers, the new
medium threatened to overturn the journalistic landscape. News announcers were
compared to grocery clerks and gas station attendants (Roy Howard, cited in Jackaway,
1995, p. 49), and print reporters lamented their lack of substance, depth, training,
and professionalism. In one noted American news event—the 1932 kidnapping of the
Lindbergh baby—radio journalists were accused of sensationalism, inaccuracy—the
baby was proclaimed “found” three separate times, and the nanny erroneously to have
committed suicide—and unprofessionalism, with a preference for “spot news broad-
casts” at the expense of fuller coverage making them suspect as journalists (Jackaway,
1995). Newspaper publishers lodged motions that criticized radio “for destroying the
surprise value of news” (Charnley, 1948, p. 11). Opposition to radio was so intense
that wire services at the time refused to sell news to radio stations unless owned by
newspapers (Hamilton, 2009). As one newspaper publisher wrote in 1924, “if radio is
to be the means of distributing news, the newspapers of the United States will soon
have very little to offer” (cited in Hamilton, 2009, p 286). In many quarters criticism
of radio persisted into the 1940s, targeting its structural, commercial, ideological, and
racial contours (Pickard, 2015).
These seemingly schizophrenic responses to radio mirrored larger questions in
culture about who could assume authority for the public record and how: “At stake
here were questions of what it means to be a journalist, who should deliver the news
to the public, the manner in which this news should be presented, and the medium
through which it should arrive” (Jackaway, 1995, p. 45). It was telling that the radio
press wars surfaced at a time in which the values and practices surrounding many
institutions were in flux—threatening “journalistic ideals of objectivity, social ideals
of public service, capitalist ideals of property rights, and political ideals of democracy”
(Jackaway, 1995, p. 7).
But though for many radio sounded the death knell of the newspaper and for oth-
ers radio signified a road with no return, both radio and the press were still standing at
the end of the radio press wars. In other words, predictions of both radio’s supremacy
and the newspaper’s early demise were overdrawn.
A later development highlights similar tension between the print media and tele-
vision of the 1950s and 1960s. As television moved to a more central place in the
journalistic landscape, largely following its broadcast coverage of the assassination
of American president John F. Kennedy in 1963 (Zelizer, 1992), its emerging stature
was expected to come at the expense of the press. By then, “the press had become
inextricably linked with television in the public mind” (Wicker, 1975, p. 2).
Like that of radio decades earlier, television’s singularity was the focus of
widespread debate. On the one hand, television had positive value: Its technological

898 Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association

B. Zelizer Terms of Choice

improvements—immediacy, visuality, drama—made it well-equipped to cover

certain kinds of news stories in an agile fashion. Driving an expectation that TV
news could draw in larger and more diverse populations, its growth—an indus-
try that was growing three times faster than the automobile industry (Beyond,
1962)—constituted a threat to older forms of written and audio communication, and
its centrality intensified with coverage of the space flights and civil rights movement
and, finally, the administration and assassination of the “first TV president” (Watson,
1990; Zelizer, 1992). With each event, recognition of its value deepened and support-
ers of the ascendant medium dismissed critics as “naïve do-gooders out of touch with
the pulse of mass taste” (Watson, 1990, p. 28). As Halberstam (1979, p. 507) wrote,
“television gave greater access, so television got better access.”
On the other hand, TV was regarded as a second-class citizen among most jour-
nalists. Widely thought to dumb down delivery of all its content, its low standards were
denigrated by noted journalists Edward R. Murrow and David Susskind at journalistic
gatherings in the late 1950s (Watson, 1990, pp. 236–237). Print reporters maintained
that theirs “was the more serious, more legitimate medium for news” (Matusow, 1983,
p. 85). In 1961, FCC Chairman Newton Minnow delivered the epithet that would
haunt TV for years to come, calling it a “vast wasteland” (Black, 1961), and, though
he used the claim to increase the time devoted to television news, the reverberations
filling the trade press were leveled against television as a medium (i.e., Beyond, 1962;
Cone, 1963; Focus, 1961). Television was critiqued for reducing reporters to “little
more than props” (Salinger, 1961) and dismissed as a “journalistic frivolity, a cum-
bersome beast unequipped to meet the demands of breaking news on a day-to-day
basis” (Gates, 1978, p. 5). It was no surprise that in late 1963, the International Press
Institute rejected a move to admit radio and television journalists, stating that they
did not constitute bona fide journalists (International, 1963).
As with the radio press wars, here too the predictions were awry. Both media
persevered, with print and television embarking on a shared journey that would
firmly connect them over the following decades in varying degrees of ascendancy on
both sides. Despite repeated warnings at the time that TV would obliterate the press,
it did not happen.
What can be made of these parallels? Though certain attributes of the evolving
landscape have arguably persisted, none took shape in the kind of before/after
environments that were suggested at the time as inevitable. The newspaper’s contem-
porary troubles, for instance, have little to do with radio and though doomsday-sayers
of both radio and TV predicted the press’s end, it was not to be. Both ascen-
dant technologies—radio and TV—prevail, but so too does the platform—the
press—that they threatened to overturn. In each case, suggestions of a definitive
transformative moment, at least insofar as it implied the disappearance of the earlier
medium, were overstated and premature.
In large part, this is because transformation is always more gradual than a
before/after narrative implies. And thus, across these moments of promised techno-
logical transformation, multiple seemingly more marginal continuances undercut the

Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association 899

Terms of Choice B. Zelizer

received narrative about journalism’s capacity to change through crisis: Was partisan
journalism ever as much the background as the celebration of objectivity claimed?
Was journalism’s mass audience ever as mass as assumed or did prevailing narratives
about the past make niche consumption less central than was the case? Was the
future of the newspaper ever a certain bet, or did generations of journalists regard
its durability with their own resonant version of skepticism? Has there ever been
agreement about what a journalist is or what journalism is for? Have people ever been
as corralled around one technology of news relay as assumed? In other words, these
questions seem to have always been part of the host environment, and it is prevailing
discourse that has treated them as more settled than they have been in fact.
Earlier points in time thus reveal more similarity to present circumstances
than might be expected: All rested on similar descriptions of uncertainty and pre-
cariousness, shared a sense of urgency, and were driven by a similar push toward
resolution. Despite the fact that many aspects of earlier threatened landscapes—about
news language, the newspaper industry, a lack of journalistic diversity, an engaged
public—continue to prevail, albeit in different forms and locations, the same dis-
course today pushes an old/new media split. As Marvin (1988, p. 235) noted long ago
in her discussion of the coming of electricity, “both change and the contemplation
of change are reciprocal events that expose old ideas to revision from contact with
new ones.” This reminds us too that the term “crisis”—with its built-in expectation
of getting to the other side, or not—may not fully represent what transpires on the
ground. The residue of these moments of only partly fulfilled transformation reminds
us that there is value in both rupture and continuity, in both change and stasis.
This is important, because it shows that prevalent discourse has long highlighted
an understanding of the challenges facing journalism as a crisis even if the term “crisis”
is not the most productive descriptor of what happened. The before/after moments,
the insistence on change, the buy-in to a different landscape did not come about in
the way that discourse about crisis has tended to predict. Because invocations of crisis
force an understanding of the host environment as unidimensional and more settled
as a contrast case, the relationship between crisis and host ends up being narrated
in a skewed fashion, giving crisis discursively more than its due. Though one can-
not be certain whether current conditions will turn out to be more fundamentally
transformative than earlier parallels, the too-easy slide into assumptions of real dif-
ference has not yet borne fruit.

Space, journalism, and crisis

Spatial dimensions similarly undermine the ability of “crisis” to adequately describe
current challenges. Generally overlooked in discussions of the crisis in journalism
is the fact that crisis has different drivers in different locations. Nielsen (2014),
for instance, pointed to coexisting versions of the current crisis: Northern Euro-
pean countries such as Finland and Germany do not experience the economic and
professional predicaments seen elsewhere, but journalism faces a crisis of pub-
lic confidence. Southern European countries such as Italy and France have two

900 Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association

B. Zelizer Terms of Choice

economic predicaments—an already weak industry now being tackled by digital

penetration—and less occupational autonomy than elsewhere. Extending on such
logic, additional diversity persists in places where the free flow of information is not
guaranteed, such as China or Russia, while in much of the Anglo-American world,
technology pushes notions of crisis. These variations suggest that one unitary crisis
in journalism is not supported on the ground.
Spatially, there is much evidence that makes crisis less relevant than assumed.
In truth, there has always been spatial variation from the norm, despite the unidi-
mensional landscape about news that keeps occupying a place in the academic imag-
ination. And though such spatial variation tends not to receive sufficient scholarly
articulation—as Connell (2007, p. 63) observed in her discussions of sociology, “the-
orizing about globalization embeds a view of the world from the global North”—its
absence typifies current discussions of crisis. Indeed, the spatial variations in present
circumstances raise serious questions about whether invocations of “crisis” are suc-
cessfully targeting the many related challenges currently plaguing the news.
In part, the lack of attention to spatial variation draws from insufficient scholarly
attention to the role played by journalism in globalization (Cottle, 2011). While schol-
arship has tended to offer polarizing views of the tensions between global and local,
universal and particular (i.e., Appadurai, 1996; Giddens, 1990), it has not paid enough
attention to what journalism does in global crises. This is partly driven by insufficient
reflection of what pushes risk in the global environment, where related phenomena
such as a lack of independence, security, or control do not help clarify where one insti-
tution ends and another begins. For journalism, such ambiguity has forced repeated
consideration of whether the crisis in journalism is primarily economic, political, or
technological, an answer that differs according to location. Though some scholars
have helped situate journalism as part of the problem—for instance, Beck’s (1992,
2009) idea of the global risk society makes journalism a central player in producing
and distributing constructed uncertainties—they have not produced enough clarity.
The reluctance to recognize the spatial limits of crisis also draws from long-
standing geographic limits on universal notions of journalism, which have been
raised by many scholars (i.e., Berger, 2009; Mancini, 2013; Wasserman, 2010). Using
an array of locations, they have shown how questions of limited press freedom, of
strange overlaps between politics, entertainment, economics, and media, of different
modernities and their ensuing power plays all keep complicating the picture. Thus,
the dramatic decrease in the circulation of print media so excessively lamented in the
Anglo-American center is not exhibited in much of Asia, India, or Latin America,
with tabloids literally exploding the landscape in Africa (Wasserman, 2010). Audi-
ences consume infotainment around the clock in much of India (Thussu, 2007a). New
formulations of public service initiatives are emerging in China, the Middle East, and
Latin America. Modalities such as music (Mano, 2011) or poster art (Gadzekpo, 2011)
move to the forefront of journalism in times of crisis in Africa in ways that both drive
a distinctiveness about journalism in the global South and clarify its independence
from the northern obsession with the new/old media technological split.

Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association 901

Terms of Choice B. Zelizer

Technology plays out differently across host locations, where those on the receiv-
ing side of new media beyond the West repeatedly point to limitations not being
entertained discursively. The underside of features such as unregulated discourse
and anonymity, structural problems such as poor network services or electrical
supply, illiteracy, and the high cost of accessing the Internet tend to be left out of
discussion (Nyamnjoh, 1999; Obijiofor, 2011; Tambini, 1999). In Wasserman’s view
(2011, p. 101), “the global reach of these technologies does not automatically imply
homogeneity in the way that professional journalists, citizen journalists/consumer–
producers, and audiences interact with them in different places around the world.”
And yet, much discourse keeps gravitating to a place where crisis seems more
consonant, identifiable, and potentially controllable. This has facilitated the promo-
tion of both a universal understanding of the conditions producing it and a vision
of new media’s adaptation that depends on universal reasoning. This tendency sug-
gests that the prevailing notion of crisis leaves out the experiences of a wide portion of
the world’s news, neutralizing still prevailing tensions between center and periphery
and disregarding new attempts to hierarchize difference. Questions remain about the
ongoing nature of crisis, the inability to recognize crisis in distant places and the rele-
vance of crisis when old questions and debates—about identity, power, morality, and
freedom—are not disappearing but have only moved temporarily to the background.
The dominant discourses about journalism’s future thus continue to center on
challenges firmly rooted in the global North. As Wasserman (2011, p. 109) recently
noted, “although there have been participants in these debates from outside the
European-American axis, the panic about the imminent death of newspapers has
been informed largely by the situation in the North.” Similarly, though technology’s
cyber-utopian promise seems to offer more access, availability, and speed, less dis-
cussed is how promise is curtailed by restrictive environments in many places of
the global South that limit who can speak and what they can say, on the one hand,
and by a global media industry that silences local journalistic initiatives, on the
other.
Even the multiple lexical attempts at reversing unidirectionality and crossing
space—the hybridity, glocalization, and contraflows associated with what Babha
(1994) called people living “between cultures”—do not always succeed. Though this
rhetoric bears a certain redemptive quality about a cyberoptic future that promises
greater participation, it also often exacerbates already existing and still unresolved
divides. As the work collected by Thussu (2007b) implies, the many versions of the
idea of flow underscore the limitations of spatial reasoning: Kavoori (2007) argued
that even contraflows—such as East/West, North/South—are so predicated on
spatial referents that they do not accommodate the deterritorialized nature of much
information transfer, while Iwabuchi (2007) saw the regionalism and counterdirec-
tionality of many contemporary flows as unduly complicating an understanding of
origins and targets. At some level, then, the very notion of global, while reflecting the
broadest spatial parameters available today, also gives way to a diminution or even
neutralization of space altogether.

902 Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association

B. Zelizer Terms of Choice

What this does to invocations of “crisis” should be clear, for it begs for more differ-
entiation than the term provides. There is, then, less similarity in the spatial dimen-
sions of crisis than has been admitted in discourse about it.

Undoing the grip of crisis

Though there have been efforts at moving away from crisis’ simplified invocation and
excavating the separate challenges that today complicate journalism’s current envi-
ronment, the insistence on looking ahead without sufficiently looking backward or
sideways is more common than not. Given the fact that today’s journalistic environ-
ments are contingent and diverse, we need to question why they have been repeatedly
brought together under a shared rubric about crisis that neutralizes much that is dis-
tinctive about them. Similarly, we need to question why the very invocation of “crisis”
avoids much of what history has taught us about its patterning.
In part, relying on a crisis frame has to do with entrenched notions of scholarly
knowledge acquisition (Connell, 2007). It also draws from the fact that uncertainty
rules in institutional settings, even though it has not been readily admitted into dis-
course about how institutions work. A resulting double-edged generational and geo-
graphic nearsightedness thus has become for many observers the prevailing response
to institutional disarray. In such a scenario, journalism’s different challenges and their
motivating impulses remain out of sight, neatly tucked into an envelope of crisis.
In this regard, it is worth returning to the issue of control with which this arti-
cle began. The need to control discourse has real effects on how the challenges facing
journalism are being envisioned. Drawing upon the closure, concreteness, and coher-
ence that discussions about crisis provide, it orients toward a pristine imagined future
that can only ensue with an arbitrarily reorganized and more certain relationship to
current conditions than is possible on the ground.
What kinds of assumptions are central to ensuring that such a vision remains
strategically intact? What has been foreclosed about the circumstances facing journal-
ism by lumping them together under the rubric of “crisis”? Conversations about the
crisis in journalism rest on three key assumptions about how journalism should func-
tion in its relationship with crisis: First, much discourse assumes that crisis is a given.
It spends much of its efforts finding origins and causes. But it rarely questions the
invocation of crisis itself or finds data that complicate what is meant when using the
term. Second, much discourse reveals a reliance on a number of connecting discur-
sive nodes that support a predetermined before and after logic. With technology, for
instance, prevalent conversations are filled with reference to new media, clouds, dig-
itization, transparency, aggregation, crowd-sourcing, producers, and user-generated
content. Each of these terms supports the technological determination of the crisis
frame but few of them existed in earlier temporal periods or across locations: What
relevance did crowd-sourcing have in the early days of the printed press? What could
transparency look like in a country where all journalists pay for information? Instead,
discourse orients to a return to journalism as it is presumed to have existed in pre-
crisis days, but the ensuing sense of utopian bliss is undermined by the specificity of

Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association 903

Terms of Choice B. Zelizer

the time period and spatial frame used as a standard bearer. Third, much discourse
assumes an overturning of value in the discussion of journalism and crisis: What was
once seen as central—the newspaper, objectivity—is now seen as toxic. This orienta-
tion to a binary logic offsets evidence that suggests more fluid connections than those
suggested.
All of these claims should give pause. Has so little been learned from either the
generations of observers who made similarly erroneous claims about the early demise
of journalism or from those who claim that its value has not changed in marginal loca-
tions? The invocation of “crisis,” then, brings with it a host of problems that obscure
our understanding of the circumstances it seeks to describe. Roitman (2014, pp. 70,
87) argued that crisis is a fundamentally future-oriented notion: Crisis, she said, “is
the place from which to posit a future. … [It] translates empirical specificity into the
language of generality.” If this is so, then existing discourse about the crisis of contem-
porary journalism reflects a fundamental belief in a return to a collective imaginary.
Structurally, it plays the same role as the enlightenment belief in human progress or
the utopian notion of transparent institutions. These are redemptive notions, confi-
dent in a shared but imagined future that can be better than the present because they
promise to offset the uncertainty generated by current conditions. But they hide the
fundamental fact that uncertainty is ours to live with, not to control and eradicate.
Crises of multiple kinds are often discussed with a similar discursive logic: Dis-
course about the environmental crisis, political crisis, and economic crisis is often
more about the control of those discussing them than it is about what unfolds on the
ground. Given that institutions of all sorts necessarily provide a home for crises, the
question remains whether uncertainty can ever end in a landscape whose contours
are institutionally driven.
There is much more to draw from the present—and past—that could be useful
to take on journalism’s journey forward. But perhaps it is worthwhile to slow down
and consider current conditions more carefully, to examine its separate challenges on
their own terms. As the British writer T.S. Eliot once said, “If you aren’t in over your
head, how do you know how tall you are?”

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Larry Gross, Nicholas Gilewicz, and Sharon Black for comments
and assistance on drafts of this manuscript. Earlier versions were presented as a
keynote address to the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia
and as the Ivan L. Preston Colloquium at the University of Wisconsin as well as pre-
sentations at the Lisbon Consortium, University of Bergen, and Akershus University
College of Applied Sciences in Norway. The author is grateful for feedback received
at each of those venues and for the comments of JOC reviewers.
References
Alexander, J., Breese, E., & Luengo, M. (Eds.) (2015). The crisis of journalism reconsidered.
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

904 Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association

B. Zelizer Terms of Choice

Anderson, C. (2011). Deliberative, agonistic, and algorithmic audiences: Journalism’s vision

of its public in an age of audience transparency. International Journal of Communication,
5, 529–547.
Anderson, C. (2013). Rebuilding the news: Metropolitan journalism in the digital age.
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Babha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London, England: Routledge.
Barthes, R. (1977). Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives. In S. Heath (Trans.),
Image, music, text (pp. 79–124). New York, NY: Hill and Wang.
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Cambridge, England: Polity.
Bauman, Z., & Bordoni, C. (2014). State of crisis. Cambridge, England: Polity.
Beck, U. (1992). Risk society. London, England: Sage.
Beck, U. (2009). World at risk. Cambridge, England: Polity.
Berger, G. (2009). How the internet impacts on international news. International
Communication Gazette, 71(5), 355–371.
Berkelaar, B., & Dutta, M. (2007, November). A culture-centered approach to crisis
communication. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Communication
Association, Chicago, IL.
Bernstein, P. L. (1998). Against the gods: The remarkable story of risk. New York, NY: Wiley.
Beyond the lifted eyebrow. (1962, April 2). TV Age.
Bird, E. (1992). For enquiring minds. Nashville: University of Tennessee Press.
Black Tuesday at the NAB Convention. (1961, May 15). Broadcasting Magazine.
Brock, G. (2013). Out of print. London, England: Kogan Page.
Broersma, M., & Peters, C. (2012). Rethinking journalism: The structural transformation of a
public good. In C. Peters & M. Broersma (Eds.), Rethinking journalism: Trust and
participation in a transformed news landscape (pp. 1–12). London, England: Routledge.
Chalaby, J. (1996). Journalism as an Anglo-American invention. European Journal of
Communication, 11(3), 303–327.
Charles, A., & Stewart, G. (2011). The end of journalism. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Charnley, M. V. (1948). News by radio. New York, NY: MacMillan.
Cone, F.M. (1963). Wasteland revisited. Television Quarterly.
Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory. London, England: Allen & Unwin.
Cottle, S. (2011). Taking global crisis in the news seriously. Global Media and
Communication, 7, 77–95.
Curran, J., & Park, M. J. (Eds.) (2000). De-westernizing media studies. London, England:
Routledge.
Davis, R. (2012). Blogging and the future of news. In H. Semetko & M. Scammel (Eds.), Sage
handbook of political communication (pp. 49–62). London, England: Sage.
Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. London, England: Sage.
Douglas, M. (1986). How institutions think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Douglas, S. (1987). Inventing American broadcasting, 1899–1922. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Downie, L. Jr., & Schudson, M. (2009, October 19). The reconstruction of American
journalism. Columbia Journalism Review.
Eisenstadt, S. N. (1995). Power, trust and meaning. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis. London, England: Pearson.
Fenton, N. (2010). New media, old news. London, England: Sage.

Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association 905

Terms of Choice B. Zelizer

Focus on news. (1961, June). Television Magazine.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge. New York, NY: Pantheon.
Fuller, J. (2010). What is happening to news: The information explosion and the crisis in
journalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gadzekpo, A. (2011). Street news: The role of posters in democratic participation in Ghana.
In H. Wasserman (Ed.), Popular media, democracy and development in Africa (pp.
105–122). London, England: Routledge.
Gates, G. P. (1978). Air time. New York, NY: Harper and Row.
Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Habermas, J. (1981). The theory of communicative action (Vol. 1). Boston. MA: Beacon Press.
Hacking, I. (1990). The taming of chance. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Halberstam, D. (1979). The powers that be. New York, NY: Laurel Books.
Hallin, D., & Mancini, P. (Eds.) (2004). Comparing media systems. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Hamilton, J. M. (2009). Journalism’s roving eye. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Hilmes, M. (1997). Radio voices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Holton, R. J. (1987). The idea of crisis in modern society. British Journal of Sociology, 38(4),
502–520.
Inglehart, R., & Welzel, C. (2005). Modernization, cultural change and democracy. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.
International press institute rejects move to admit radio-tv newsmen. (1963, June). New York
Times, 8, p. 52.
Iwabuchi, K. (2007). Contra-flows or the cultural logic of uneven globalization?. In D. Thussu
(Ed.), Media on the move (pp. 67–83). London, England: Routledge.
Jackaway, G. (1995). Media at war. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Jessop, B. (2013). Recovered imaginaries, imagined recoveries. In M. Benner (Ed.), Before and
beyond the global economic crisis (pp. 234–254). Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar.
Jones, A. (2009). Losing the news. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Josephi, B. (2010). Internationalizing the journalistic professional model: Imperatives and
impediments. Global Media and Communication, 3(3), 300–306.
Kaempffert, W. (1924, June). The social destiny of radio. Forum, p. 772.
Kavoori, A. P. (2007). Thinking through contra-flows. In D. Thussu (Ed.), Media on the move
(pp. 49–64). London, England: Routledge.
Koselleck, R. (1959/1988). Critique and crisis. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Levy, D., & Nielsen, R. (Eds.) (2010). The changing business of news and its implications for
democracy. Oxford, England: The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Lloyd, J. (2004). What the media are doing to our politics. London, England: Constable and
Robinson.
Mancini, P. (2013). What scholars can learn from the crisis of journalism. International
Journal of Communication, 7, 127–136.
Mano, W. (2011). Popular music as journalism in Africa: Issues and contexts. In H.
Wasserman (Ed.), Popular media, democracy and development in Africa (pp. 91–104).
London, England: Routledge.
Marvin, C. (1988). When old technologies were new. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Matusow, B. (1983). The evening stars. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Mayr, A. (2008). Language and power. London, England: Continuum.

906 Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association

B. Zelizer Terms of Choice

McChesney, R., & Nichols, J. (2010). The death and life of American journalism. Philadelphia,
PA: Nation Books.
McChesney, R., & Pickard, V. (Eds.) (2011). Will the last reporter please turn out the lights?
New York, NY: New Press.
Mersey, R. D. (2010). Can journalism be saved? Los Angeles, CA: Praeger.
Meyer, P. (2006). The vanishing newspaper. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.
Mindich, D. (2005). Tuned out. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, T. (2002). The stage of modernity. In T. Mitchell (Ed.), Questions of modernity (pp.
1–34). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mumby, D. (1988). Communication and power in organizations. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Neuberger, C., & Nuembergk, C. (2010). Competition, complementary or integration?
Journalism Practice, 4(3), 319–342.
Nielsen, R. (2014, May). The many crises of Western journalism: A comparative analysis of
economic, professional and symbolic crises. Paper presented at STI’s the crisis of journalism
reconsidered: Cultural power, Barcelona, Spain.
Nyamnjoh, F. B. (1999). Africa and the information superhighway. Ecquid Novi: African
Journalism Studies, 41(3), 69–91.
O’Malley, P. (2004). Risk, uncertainty and government. London, England: GlassHouse Press.
Obijiofor, L. (2011). New technologies as tools of empowerment: African youth and public
sphere participation. In H. Wasserman (Ed.), Popular media, democracy and development
in Africa (pp. 207–219). London, England: Routledge.
Patterson, T. (2013). Informing the news. New York, NY: Vintage.
Peters, C., & Broersma, M. (2012). Rethinking journalism: Trust and participation in a
transformed news landscape. London, England: Routledge.
Peters, C., & Broersma, M. (2014). Retelling journalism: Conveying stories in a digital age.
Leuven, Belgium: Peeters.
Phillips, N., Lawrence, T. B., & Hardy, C. (2004). Discourse and institutions. Academy of
Management Review, 29(4), 635–652.
Pickard, V. (2015). America’s battle for media democracy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Potter, J., & Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and social psychology. London, England: Sage.
Powell, W., & Dimaggio, P. (1991). The new institutionalism in organizational analysis.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Prigogine, I. (1997). The end of certainty. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Radio—The new social force. (1924, March 19). Outlook, p. 465.
Readings, B. (1996). The university in ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Roitman, J. (2014). Anti-crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony and solidarity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
de Rycker, A., & Mohd Don, Z. (Eds.) (2013). Discourse and crisis: Critical perspectives.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Salinger versus the press. (1961, April 28). Time.
Santos, B. d. S. (1992). A discourse on the sciences. Review, 15, 9–47.
Schlesinger, P. (2006). Is there a crisis in British journalism? Media Culture & Society, 28(2),
299–307.
Shirky, C. (2009). Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable. Retrieved from
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association 907

Terms of Choice B. Zelizer

Starkman, D. (2014). The watchdog that didn’t bark. New York, NY: Columbia University
Press.
Stephens, M. (2014). Beyond news: The future of journalism. New York, NY: Columbia
University Press.
Tambini, D. (1999). New media and democracy. New Media and Society, 1(3), 305–329.
Thussu, D. (2007a). News as entertainment. London, England: Sage.
Thussu, D. (Ed.) (2007b). Media on the move. London, England: Routledge.
Van der Haak, B., Parks, M., & Castells, M. (2012). The future of journalism: Networked
journalism. International Journal of Communication, 6, 2923–2938.
Waisbord, S. (2000). Watchdog journalism in South America. New York, NY: Columbia
University Press.
Wallerstein, I. (2004). The uncertainties of knowledge. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press.
Wasserman, H. (2010). Tabloid journalism in South Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Wasserman, H. (2011). Global journalism studies: Beyond panoramas. Communicatio: South
African Journal for Communication Theory and Research, 37(1), 100–117.
Watson, M. A. (1990). The expanding vista. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Weber, M. (1914/1978). Max Weber: Selections in translation. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
White, H. (1980). The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. In W. J. T. Mitchell
(Ed.), On narrative (pp. 1–23). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Wicker, T. (1975). On press. New York, NY: Berkley.
Zelizer, B. (1992). Covering the body: The Kennedy assassination, the media and the shaping of
collective memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Zelizer, B. (2011). Journalism in the service of communication. Journal of Communication,
61, 1–27.
Zelizer, B. (2013). On the shelf life of democracy in journalism scholarship. Journalism:
Theory, Practice and Criticism, 14(4), 459–473.

908 Journal of Communication 65 (2015) 888–908 © 2015 International Communication Association