Journalistic Authority

When we encounter a news story, why do we accept its version of events? A complicated set of cultural, structural, and technological relationships inform this interaction, and Journalistic Authority provides a relational theory for explaining how journalists attain authority. The book argues that authority is not a thing to be possessed or lost, but a quality of the connections between those laying claim to being an authority and those who assent to it.

Matt Carlson examines the practices journalists use to legitimate their work: professional orientation, development of specific news forms, and the personal narratives they circulate to support a privileged social place. He then considers journalists' relationships with the audiences, sources, technologies, and critics that shape journalistic authority in the contemporary media environment. Carlson argues that journalistic authority is always the product of complex and variable relationships. By creating a schema to account for this complexity, he presents a new model for critiquing journalism while advocating for the norms and practices we want to be authoritative.

Matt Carlson is associate professor of communication at Saint Louis University. He is author of On the Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism (2011) and coeditor of Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation (2015) and Journalists, Sources, and Credibility: New Perspectives (2010).