On the immateriality of Journalism’s object of study

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Gislene da
• Data de Publicação: 2009
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: E-Compós
• Texto Completo: https://www.e-compos.org.br/e-compos/article/view/372
• topic: jornalismo; epistemologia; teoria; objeto

The search for a theory of journalism that does not import conceptual and theoretical resources from other fields of activity but rather concentrates itself in the formulation and study of its own object represents a continuous challenge for researchers of the field. In trying to mark out its territory this subarea ends up reproducing epistemological attitudes often seen in the bigger field of communication studies, in a pendular movement that veers towards the centrality of technical expertise (journalism investigated as a means to solve specific problems of this social practice) or towards multidisciplinary criticism (which formulates and tries to understand journalism as a communicative phenomenon). These two options, when isolated, are taken to be responsible for the theoretical fragility of research in journalism. This essay analyses the problems of finding journalism’s object of study exclusively in the specificities of its material products (magazines, newspapers, radio, television and news sites). The many empirical manifestations of the object cannot be taken to be the object itself, this one always bigger than its material manifestations and always theoretically construed. We incur in error when speaking of journalism and its “objects” in plural form. Journalism’s object of study must be one, but in order to recognize its multiple empirical manifestations we must improve conceptual and methodological apparatuses, beginning with the concept of object of study.