Oligopolies of the past? Habermas, Bourdieu, and conceptual approaches to news agencies

Abstract

This article uses the history of news agencies, particularly in Germany, to explore key theories about media transitions. First, many over-emphasize technology as an autonomous factor divorced from politics, economics, and culture. Historical methodologies remind us that technology is socially constructed, as I show using the example of wireless technology. Second, the economic dominance of platforms has become central to the debate about how to reform the Internet. This too draws on long-standing conceptual approaches to media, pioneered by Habermas. Like online platforms, news agencies were bottlenecks for news; their history reminds us that their dominance stemmed from politics as much as economics. Finally, I suggest that we need to include Bourdieu’s ideas of symbolic power and institutions to understand why certain media firms became so central. To understand news agencies, we can thus combine the work of Habermas and Bourdieu with theories about the social construction of technology to retrace the interaction between politics, economics, technology, and social norms that imbued news agencies with such power for so long.

How does a national, multilingual news agency contribute to news diversity? A mixed-methods case study

“…News agencies have been poorly theorised in existing scholarship (Rantanen, 2019), with their presence typically taken for granted by media policymakers and scholars. The most frequently used conceptual frameworks revolve around media dependency or flows, hybridity or concepts such as Bourdieu's symbolic power (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 2000;Rantanen, 2021;Tworek, 2020). We contribute to this ongoing debate by positioning news agencies and their unique position in media ecosystems within a wider framework of news diversity.…”

Novels and newspapers in Piketty's Capital and Ideology

“…Habermas (1989) argued that the increasingly monopolistic structures of news in the nineteenth century had undermined the possibility for deliberative public discourse. And indeed, Habermas' very concept of the “public sphere” has now been subject to decades of lively and important critique (Tworek, 2020) for its focus on the white male bourgeoisie as well as his idealization of rational discussion that ignores “the extent to which its institutions were founded on sectionalism, exclusiveness and repression” (Eley, 1992, p. 321).…”