This study assesses the current state of the television news capstone experience in accredited journalism and mass communication programs in the United States. Specifically, the authors employed a mixed-methods approach, interviewing 20 television news capstone instructors and conducting an analysis of broadcast journalism curriculum information obtained from 113 schools. More than 90 percent of accredited schools offer a television news capstone, and faculty had similar insights about television news instruction and how best to teach the television news capstone course.
As a form of communication that can inspire solidarity through appeals to democratic ideals, literary journalism can play a constitutive role in social and political struggles for justice and freedom in democratic societies. In 1963, at a pivotal moment in the US Civil Rights Movement, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time helped many Americans, including those in the highest offices of the federal government, understand the moral good of the goals of the African American freedom struggle and the democratic imperative to enact and protect the civil rights of all Americans. In this way, Baldwin’s work, along with other key historical forces, helped to expand the civil sphere and build a more just and democratic society in the United States. Civil sphere theory helps explain the role of such communication in social struggles for democracy.
This special issue of the Journal of Communication Inquiry (JCI) explores the promises and challenges of civil sphere theory for the study of communication and journalism in democratic societies.In 2006, Jeffrey Alexander, a cultural sociologist at Yale, published The Civil Sphere, the culmination of several decades of work exploring the "cultural structure at the heart of democratic life." Concerns about justice and democratic institutions animate Alexander's theory of the civil sphere, which takes seriously the roles that culture and communication play in struggles for justice in democratic societies. The theory focuses on communication and examines "real as compared to ideal civil societies." The theory is thus empirically grounded, offering a new conceptual framework for scholars in their analyses of the role of journalism and communication in social struggles.The essays in this special issue began as remarks for a panel on civil sphere theory at the 2014 annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Sponsored by the Cultural and Critical Studies Division and the History Division of AEJMC, the panel featured all the scholars whose essays appear here. This collection adds another voice with an essay by Rick Popp, who served as the panel's moderator. The essays make for an intellectually challenging read as they represent a range of perspectives on the value and validity of civil sphere theory for the study of communication's role in democratic life.My essay serves as both primer on and apology for civil sphere theory. I suggest that scholars of both sociology and political philosophy have recently focused attention on the role of culture and emotion in political and social change, and I argue that they are right to consider culture (and communication) as a powerful structure in social life. I highlight important distinctions between civil sphere theory and public sphere theory and suggest that journalism studies would benefit from a greater analytical focus on the civil sphere concepts of civil society, social struggle, solidarity, and justice.John Nerone challenges what he views as the theory's insufficient attention to the hegemonic orders in which institutions of journalism exist. Along the way, he wittily (and brilliantly) invokes Plato's Thrasymachus (Alexander's exemplar of material hard power). His essay reviews Alexander's theoretical and historical moves and challenges his analysis of the role of journalism in the U.S. Civil
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